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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lm 

TORONTO 


< 




An Introduction to the 
Psychology of Religion 


BY 

ROBERT H. THOULESS, M.A. 

11 

FELLOW OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, CAM¬ 
BRIDGE, LECTURER IN PSYCHOLOGY AT THE 
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 


11 


J15fto gorS 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1923 


All rights reserved 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Copyright, 1923, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and printed. Published January, 1923. 


Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 


FEB -7 *23 

V 4 

©C1A69S223 Vy -k * 



PREFACE 

T he present book is the result of a request to put into 
book form the substance of lectures delivered to ordi¬ 
nation candidates during the Long Vacation at Cam¬ 
bridge. This fact explains its scope. While it is hoped 
that it may appeal to professed psychologists as well, 
it is intended primarily for those who wish to study 
the psychological problems of religion, without any 
prior knowledge of psychological terminology. It must 
be judged chiefly by its success or failure in meeting 
the needs of this class of readers. The author’s excuse 
for adding to the enormous volume of literature dealing 
with religious subjects is that there seemed to be a 
niche in such readers’ requirements which no existing 
book quite filled, and he has attempted to fill it. 

It is difficult adequately to acknowledge my personal 
obligations to the many friends who have given help 
and encouragement in the preparation of this volume. 
Dr Rivers, whose recent death leaves such a sad gap in 
the ranks of Cambridge psychologists, read through all 
the typescript and gave valuable advice. I am equally 
indebted for the same help to Professor Sorley and Mr 
Spens. Father Cary, S.S.J.E., read and criticised the 
chapters on Prayer and Mysticism. Professor Pear 
and Mr Mackay very kindly read through my proofs. 

The Editors of Theology and The Quest generously 
gave permission for the reprint (with modifications) of 
articles which originally appeared in their papers. 

R. H. T. 

Corpus Christi College 
Cambridge 

June, 1922. 









CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Psychology of Religion. 1 

II The Traditional Element in Religious 

Belief.16 

III The Natural Element.30 

IV The Moral Element.45 

V The Affective Element.58 

VI The Rational Element.78 

VII Conscious Processes.*. . 92 

VIII The Unconscious.102 

IX The Instincts.117 

X The Sex-Instinct and Religion . . . 127 

XI The Herd-Instinct and Religion . . . 140 

XII Worship and Prayer.159 

XIII Conversion.187 

XIV Mystical and Adolescent Conversions . 205 

XV Mysticism.225 

XVI A Modern Mystic.242 

XVII General Considerations.260 

Index.283 





















AN INTRODUCTION TO THE 
PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 










CHAPTER I 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

A serious difficulty is introduced into the task of 
writing an introduction to the psychological study of 
religion by the fluid state of the science of psychology 
and particularly of its terminology. Since the object of 
the present book is not primarily to teach its readers 
psychology, it would merely be a waste of time to 
discuss the merits of alternative psychological theories 
when we come to matters about which there is dispute. 
In order to avoid this waste, it will be necessary at such 
points to limit myself to a description of the theory 
which seems to me to be the one which has most chance 
of proving to be of permanent value, with an indication 
of the terminology which I intend to use. Where I 
am differing widely from the more conservative 
psychologists, I propose to mention the existence of 
alternatives without arguing about them. This proce¬ 
dure will make the psychological part of this book 
appear to be very dogmatic, but it is necessary if I am 
to avoid confusing and wearying those of my readers 
whose knowledge of pure psychology is slight. This 
appearance of dogmatism would, I hope, have been 
avoided if I had attempted to write a book on pure 
psychology; but, for my present purpose, it is only 
necessary that I should make my own position and use 
of language clear so that I may not be misunderstood. 

The first subject that it is necessary to discuss is the 
meaning we intend to attach to the word religion . It 

l 


2 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

is not, perhaps, necessary to reach an academically 
satisfactory definition of religion, but we must come to 
a sufficient agreement about the use of the word to set 
some limits, however vague, to the subjects we propose 
to discuss under the psychology of religion. We must 
avoid the temptation, common amongst writers on 
religion, of defining it too narrowly, and thus unduly 
limiting the scope of our discussion. Such writers 
remind us of Mr Thwackum who when he mentioned 
religion meant the Christian religion; and not only 
the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and 
not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of 
England. 

If, for example, with Hegel we define religion as “the 
knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature as 
absolute mind,” we are making the meaning of religion 
far narrower than it is in common speech, for it would 
appear from this definition that a man can only be 
religious if he is a metaphysician. Similarly, we must 
not define religion in such a way as to imply that a man 
cannot be religious unless he is good. Many persons, as 
for example, Cellini, have been extremely religious and 
extremely wicked. This fact rules out such a definition 
as that of F. W. H. Myers—that religion is “the sane 
and normal response of the human spirit to all that we 
know of cosmic law.” 1 

In Professor Leuba’s A Psychological Study of 
Religion 2 there is a valuable and interesting appendix 
in which he has collected no less than forty-eight dif¬ 
ferent definitions of religion from various writers. Of 
these forty-eight definitions, I wish to draw attention to 
three only which will be sufficient to serve as illustra- 

1 Human Personality (London, 1903), n. p. 284. 

3 New York, 1912. 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 3 

tions of the three different classes into which most of 
the others may be divided. 

The first is given by Frazer in The Golden Bough: 
“By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or con¬ 
ciliation of powers superior to man which are believed 
to direct and control the course of Nature and of human 
life.” 1 The second comes from A Study of Religion by 
James Martineau. To him, religion is “the belief in an 
everliving God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will 
ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with 
mankind.” 2 The third is Dr McTaggart’s definition in 
Some Dogmas of Religion: “Religion is clearly a state 
of mind. ... It seems to me that it may best be 
described as an emotion resting on a conviction of har¬ 
mony between ourselves and the universe at large.” 3 

A scrutiny of these three definitions shows that they 
are applying the word religion to three completely 
different things. The first describes a mode of be¬ 
haviour, the second an intellectual belief or opinion, the 
third a system of feelings. It is possible to regard reli¬ 
gion as any one of these three things or as any combi¬ 
nation of them. It seems, however, more consistent 
with the ordinary meaning of the word religion to treat 
all three as essential elements in it. We should, for 
example, refuse the name religion to an opinion that 
there was in fact a God, if that opinion had no influence 
at all on the holder’s behaviour. 

Our definition of religion will, therefore, include in 
association a mode of behaviour, a system of intellec¬ 
tual beliefs and a system of feelings. In order to find a 
complete and satisfactory definition, we must further 
enquire what is the particular mark of the conduct, 
beliefs and feelings in question which characterises 

1 2nd ed. (London, 1911), i. p. 63. 2 p. 1. 3 p. 3. 



4 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

them as religious. To this question many different 
answers have been given. Hoffding calls a belief in 
‘the conservation of value’ the distinctive character of 
religion; Royce thinks that it is loyalty. The man in 
the street would probably reply that it is the belief in 
God, and (remembering the existence of polytheistic 
religions) he might add ‘or in gods.’ I see no sufficient 
reason for not adopting this as the distinctive character 
of religion. In order to avoid the use of the undefined 
word god, it may conveniently be replaced by the term 
superhuman being (superhuman implying nothing 
more than that the being in question is felt to be 
greater than man, and may be looked up to by him). 
Our definition will then run in some such form as this: 
Religion is a felt practical relationship with what is 
believed in as a superhuman being or beings. 

This definition will be found to be sufficient for the 
purpose for which we require it—to indicate the sense 
in which the word religion will be used in the course of 
this book. Possibly for a different purpose, a different 
definition would have been found more convenient. It 
will be noticed that no mention has been made of the 
marks which theologians often introduce into their 
definitions of God—self-existence, infinity, and eter¬ 
nity. These things have no meaning except on a level 
of intellectual development which most religious per¬ 
sons, even though they be monotheists, have not 
reached. In the scientific study of religion it would be 
absurd to include them as essential marks of religious 
beliefs unless we intended to confine our study to the 
religion of philosophers. 

There are two terms in common use in the psychology 
of religion which must be explained. These are the 
religious consciousness, and religious experience. The 




5 


( THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

religious consciousness is that part of religion which is 
present to the mind and is open to examination by 
introspection. It is the mental side of religious activ¬ 
ity. Religious experience is a vaguer term used to 
| describe the feeling element in the religious conscious- 
\ ness—the feelings which lead to religious belief or are 
f the effects of religious behaviour. Examples of what is 
meant by religious experience are: the sense of the 
presence of God described by the mystics, which also is 
not very uncommon amongst other people; the feeling 
of peace after prayer or sacrament; and the less 
intense, hardly perceptible, emotional undercurrent 
which accompanies ordinary religious life. 

The main business of the psychology of religion is to 
study the religious consciousness. But it is impossible 
to study that alone; we must investigate religious 
behaviour as well. Modern psychology has become 
fruitful by giving up the attempt to confine itself to 
mind alone, and including human behaviour in its field. 
All experimental psychology is a study of behaviour, 
and the American school of behaviourists confine them¬ 
selves entirely to this study, and refuse to concern 
themselves with the mind at all. In order to make the 
study of the psychology of religion fruitful, we must 
include religious behaviour as part of the problem to be 
investigated. 

t The method of the psychology of religion is the 
method of science—the study of the facts which come 
within its province in an objective and impartial man¬ 
ner. As far as possible, we must try to approach it with 
none of the prejudices for or against particular religious 
customs or beliefs which result from our opinions about 
their truth or value. We must examine the strange 
writings of the erotic mystics and the wilder American 



6 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


revivals with the same scientific respect as we show to 
the services of matins and evensong in the established 
church. We must not be ready to damn them at once 
with that invaluable word pathological. It is possible 
that a study of what are called pathological forms of 
the religious consciousness may be of great value in the 
elucidation of the workings of the normal religious 
mind. The questions of truth and value raised by them 
belong properly to the philosophy of religion. 

At the same time, it is true that we cannot, in the 
end, be content to rest in mere description. For most 
of us the practical interest of the psychology of religion 
—its bearing on the question of the truth and value of 
religion—is far greater than our interest in its purely 
theoretical side. Unless we are to ignore this practical 
interest altogether, we cannot help encroaching to this 
extent on the field of the philosophy of religion. I 
intend to neglect these questions at present, and to 
. return to them later. 

The psychology of religion is an attempt to express 
the workings of the mind w 7 hen it is religious in terms 
of the mental processes we have discovered in secular 
psychology. It makes the reasonable assumption 
(which would be discredited by our total failure to con¬ 
struct a scientific psychology of religion) that a man’s 
mind works in the same way in his religion as it does in 
his other activities. The psychologist is no more 
necessarily concerned with the question of whether 
religious experience is caused by anything outside the 
subject than is the physicist with the question of the 
reality of matter. It is true that most psychologists do 
in fact interest themselves in trying to show either that 
all the phenomena of religious experience can be ex¬ 
plained without any religious assumptions, or that they 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 7 

do point to an agent outside the individual experiencing 
them. This, however, is only an interesting and im¬ 
portant application of the psychologist’s results; the 
conclusion he comes to will not influence him funda¬ 
mentally in his descriptive work. Whatever the origin 
of the mental states of religion, we assume that once 
they are in a man’s mind they will obey ordinary 
mental laws; in other words, that they will prove 
amenable to treatment by the methods of ordinary 
psychology. 

In this, I am dissociating myself entirely from that 
school whose conception of the task of the psychology 
of religion is that it is to create a new and mystifying 
psychology for religion alone. It explains every new 
fact by the creation of some fresh mental faculty, which 
it christens with some such name as transcendental 
consciousness. When its inventive genius for new 
faculties fails, it brings in the mystery of the sub¬ 
conscious or the more ethically pretentious supracon- 
scious. The objection to it is, of course, the objection 
to all faculty psychology—that it explains nothing but 
creates entities which are no more than the facts 
themselves which they were required to explain. So 
long as it claims to be merely description, there is no 
objection to this, provided that its terminology is 
simple and useful. If it claims to be scientific explana¬ 
tion, it is mere charlatanism. 

It may be objected that the method of approach we 
are adopting is a very undesirable one to apply to 
religion. Scientific method itself tends to destroy that 
atmosphere of reverence which should surround reli¬ 
gion, and thus brings it down to the level of other 
activities. This is an objection with which we must 
sympathise; but it is not, I think, sufficiently well 



8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

grounded. Unless religion is in reality a fancy woven 
by man out of his own mind, no scientific analysis will 
prove it so. On the other hand, if (as is freely assumed 
by modern writers on religion) psychology can produce 
real support for religion, it is clear that the value of our 
study of the psychology of religion will be proportion¬ 
ate to the completeness with which we detach our 
minds from our own beliefs and judgments. An inves¬ 
tigation which was only concerned with the facts which 
seemed to support religion, which hesitated to go any 
further when it appeared to be discovering natural 
explanations for what had previously been supposed to 
be supernatural processes, would obviously be of no 
value at all as evidence. The strength of any evidence 
that a scientific study of the religious consciousness can 
bring for the reality of the objects of religion will de¬ 
pend entirely on how far we have made that study in a 
scientific spirit, without either over-emphasising the 
facts which support religion or neglecting those which 
appear to discredit it. 

To those who think that such a study is better not 
undertaken at all lest religious faith should be dis¬ 
turbed, it is necessary to point out that all these ques¬ 
tions are already being raised. We cannot get back 
into a condition in which they have not been raised at 
all. If any individual feels that he does not wish to 
disturb his own religious faith by questioning its foun¬ 
dations, he has a perfect right not to do so. But he 
should not be reading a book on the psychology of reli¬ 
gion ; if, by a mistake, he is, the right course for him to 
adopt is to close it at this point and to read no further. 

At the same time, it is probable that the extent to 
which the psychological study of religion has power to 
dissolve religious faith is exaggerated. When the psy- 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 9 

chologist describes what he believes to be the mental 
laws by which such an event as a conversion takes 
place, he in no way excludes the explanation of it which 
would be given by the Salvation Army—that it takes 
place by the Grace of God. The physiologist’s expla¬ 
nation that a movement in my finger took place by 
muscular contractions brought about by a neural 
current started by a change (possibly chemical) in the 
cerebral cortex, in no way excludes the equally true 
explanation that I moved my finger because I wanted 
to. The psychologist and the Salvationist are explain¬ 
ing the same event on different levels. Both may be 
equally right. The psychologist may, of course, have a 
private opinion that the explanation of the Salvationist 
is wrong, but on this question he has no more right to 
dogmatise than anyone else. He may be wrong, and 
the Salvationist may know that he is wrong. To one 
who is sure that he has the vision of God, the scientific 
psychologist of religion can be no more than a blind 
man talking about colours. 

The method of a psychological study of religion 
which claims to be scientific must be, in the widest 
sense of the word, empirical. In other words, such a 
study must proceed by the method of drawing conclu¬ 
sions from observed facts and not by arm-chair reflec¬ 
tion divorced from experience. It is true that it will 
not be able to make much use of experiment, that is, of 
the observation of the changes which are produced in 
phenomena by intentionally produced changes in the 
conditions under which they develop. Experiment, 
however, is not the sole source of empirical knowledge. 
There is also observation, which is the method we-use 
when we are not free ourselves to modify the conditions 
under which phenomena are observed but must be 





10 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


content with studying them-in such varying situations 
as are provided for us. Although we cannot experiment 
in-the psychology of YeTIgion as we can when we are 
studying the psychology of sensation, we are not ex¬ 
empted from the duty of being able to justify our 
conclusions by an appeal to experience. 

There seem to be three main sources from which data 
may be drawn for a psychological study of religion. 
These are: first, what can be discovered by questioning 
living persons; secondly, what can be discovered by 
examining ourselves; and thirdly, the information 
which can be drawn from the autobiographies and other 
writings of religious persons. Of these, the third is the 
evidence on which the present work mostly relies, while 
the first and second are used only subordinately. 

The most highly systematised method of obtaining 
evidence from living persons is by means of the ques¬ 
tionnaire. This is a series of questions issued to a large 
number of persons. It is peculiarly well adapted to 
obtain statistical information about what people be¬ 
lieve. It has obvious limitations which are illustrated 
by the use made of it by T Starbuck to obtain informa¬ 
tion about conversion . 1 It is difficult not to feel that 
Starbuck’s conclusions about the part played by emo¬ 
tion, intellect, etc., in conversions, from the number of 
people who have mentioned these in their reply, are of 
extremely doubtful value. Leub a used^ thej question- 
naire to determine the percentage of scientific" workers 
of different kinds who believed in God andJn immortal¬ 
ity. This is the kind of problem for the elucidation of 
which the questionnaire seems to be well adapted. It 
is a pity that Professor Leuba was not content with 
this, but tried to'clraw from his results conclusions 

*New York, 1903. 





THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


11 


about the existence of God and the immortality of the 
soul, problems upon which a questionnaire, even if 
issued to leading scientific workers, is altogether in¬ 
capable of throwing any light. 

While I am not in the present book making explicit 
use of self-analysis as data for my enquiry, it can never 
be altogether absent. The scheme of one’s classifica¬ 
tion must always be provided in part from one’s own 
religious development. Both in this and the previous 
kind of data, it is important to remember that one must 
not be content with mere introspection. The study of 
behaviour gives results which must supplement the 
data of introspection, and the psychoanalytic method 
of investigating the mind also makes a contribution to 
our knowledge. [An obvious criticism of the question¬ 
naire is that its replies are mere introspections whose 
value we could only judge if we could have also the 
testimony of the friends and relatives of the subjects, 
f One of the advantages of the analysis of written J 
material as an empirical basis, is that in this we are 
not confined to the introspections of our subjects. 
Contemporary biographies throw light on the beha¬ 
viour of the religious person when this is important for 
the understanding of his introspections. We can also 
observe the influence of his personal history and of his 
environment on his religious developme nt, JB uch infor¬ 
mation is generally not given at all in a questionnaire.^ 
At the same time, when he talks widely and freely on a 
variety of subjects, he often enables us to guess at the 
unconscious springs of his thought in a way which is 
not intended by himself. This also is an advantage 
foregone by the users of the questionnaire method. 

I intend to use as material for this book the more 
developed religions rather than the primitive ones, 



12 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

because our own mental processes and those of the 
people with whom we live or whose books we read, are 
open to our observation in a way that is impossible for 
the mental processes of primitive man. For the same 
reason I propose to draw my illustrations principally 
from the religion with which we are most familiar— 
Christianity. 

The first problem which it is necessary to discuss is 
perhaps most simply to be expressed as follows: what 
are the conscious roots of the belief in God as it is found 
in the mind of a believer in one of the higher religions? 
We find that this question has been answered in many 
different ways. St Anselm thought that he could prove 
the existence of God by an a priori process of reasoning 
quite apart from experience of any kind. Some persons 
say that they feel a certainty of His existence which 
they cannot doubt although they confess that they are 
not able to prove it. Others rest their belief on the 
authority of the Church or of the Bible. Others are 
convinced of the reality of the demands of morality, 
and can find no sufficient sanction for them except in 
the conception of a supreme lawgiver. Others are 
entranced by the beauty of Nature, and find in this the 
signature of a loving creator. 

We need not dispute about which of these is the true 
method of approach, but recognise in each of them one 
element which goes to the building up of that complex 
mental product we call religion. \Tf we try to classify 
those elements which help to produce belief in God we 
find that they fall under three main headings. 

These are: 

(1) The influence of tradition, childhood teaching, etc. 

(2) Various experiences of the individual which are 
harmonised by the beliefs which he has been taught. 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 13 

(3) Processes of reasoning by which he subsequently 
justifies them. 

If we wish to name these three roots of religious 
belief, we may call them the traditional, the experi¬ 
ential, and the rational element respectively. / 

The experiences which have been included in the 
experiential root are so varied that we may conven¬ 
iently further classify them as follows: 

(а) The experience of beauty, harmony and benefi¬ 
cence in the external world; in conflict with ugliness, 
disorder and malevolence. 

(б) The moral conflict, i.e., the conflict in the indi¬ 
vidual’s own mind between the impulses he recognises 
as evil and those he believes to be good. 

(c) The inner emotional experiences connected with 
the idea of God. 

These I propose to call the natural, the moral and 
the affective element. 

This gives five main roots of religious belief which 
will be discussed in more detail during the course of 
the next five chapters. They can be summarised in the 
following form: 

(1) The influence of tradition, etc. (the traditional 
element). 

(2) Experiences harmonised by religious belief. 

(а) Beauty, harmony and beneficence in the out¬ 
side world (the natural element). 

(б) The moral conflict (the moral element). 

(c) Emotional experience (the affective element). 

(3) Processes of reasoning (the rational element). 

The above classification will help us to treat the 

problem we are discussing in an orderly manner. We 
must, however, be on our guard against the pitfalls 
which are open to us if we attach too much importance 


14 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

to our own classifications. There is no shallower 
method in psychology than mat of those who arrange 
types in a neatly numbered series and then proceed to 
fit the infinite varieties of human life into their rigidly 
conceived framework. We should be making an evil 
use of the analysis just performed if we thought it 
justified us in allocating all the human beings of our 
acquaintance to the traditional, the rational, or to one 
of the three sub-varieties of the experiential type. I We 
shall indeed find that in some forms of religiom the 
contribution of one of these roots is exaggerated at the 
expense of others; and I shall speak of such forms of 
religion (and of such forms only) as types —as the 
traditional type when it is the traditional element 
which is exaggerated, and so on. These, however, are 
exceptional growths, often in response to the require¬ 
ments of a theory. If, for example, a man makes up 
his mind in his study that the sole valid function of 
religion is that of dealing with the moral conflict, we 
need not be surprised to find that he develops a religion 
of the moral type, in which the moral element attains 
unusual prominence. When dealing later with each of 
these elements in turn, we shall notice the type of re¬ 
ligion which results from their exaggeration. The more 
usual development of religion, however, will be from 
a variety of roots and an exclusive emphasis on one 
may be taken as a sign of an abnormal development. 

rXt the same time, we must remember that we havja 
so far established no criterion of normality in religion! 
When we speak of a religious type having been formed 
by the exaggeration of one element in the mental 
groundwork of religion, we can only mean that it is 
exaggerated as compared with the religion we most 
commonly find. We have no right to mean that it is 


15 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

exaggerated as compared with religion as it ought to be. 
It is possible, for example, that the purest and most 
highly developed religion would be what we have called 
religion of the moral type. I do not believe that this is 
the case, for reasons which I shall discuss in a later 
chapter. So many people, however, do believe it that 
it would be dishonest for me to use language which 
prejudged the question in my own favour, by describ¬ 
ing religion of the ordinary kind as normal and speak¬ 
ing of this as an exaggeration with an implied condem¬ 
nation of it. 

Just as such types of religion result from a strong 
emphasis in practice on one of these roots and com¬ 
parative neglect of the others, so dogmatic schools in 
the philosophy or psychology of religion result from a 
similar over-emphasis in theory. An example of this 
may be found in a work on the psychology of religion, 
in which the author makes it clear in his preface that he 
considered that the only element belonging properly 
to religion was the moral element. 1 Philosophers of 
religion have often occupied themselves exclusively 
with the arguments for the existence of God, and sup¬ 
posed that this was the whole foundation of religion. 
Their influence on the religious life of their times has 
been small, because what they were arguing about 
played only a small part in determining whether people 
believed or disbelieved in God. When a philosopher 
supposed that he had successfully refuted all the argu¬ 
ments for the existence of God which had so far been 
brought forward, there was no general abandonment of 
religious faith. At most, he had destroyed only one of 
the elements which determine religious belief; the 
others remained as firm as before. 

1 The Psychology of Religion, by Coe (Chicago, 1916). 


CHAPTER II 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT IN 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF j 


At the end of the last chapter, we had distinguished 
five main conscious roots of the belief in God. We are 
now going to discuss at greater length the first of these: 
the influence of such factors as childhood teaching, of 
tradition. This is an element which we always tend to 
regard as playing a much smaller part in the formation 
of our own beliefs than modern psychologists insist 
that in fact it does. Theorists’ discussions of religious 
experience too often make the tacit assumption that 
the problem of the psychology of religion is to discover 
what kind of religion a man would develop from his 
own inner experience if he had been entirely cut off 
from his fellow men from infancy by being abandoned 
on a desert island. The problem in real life is not so 
simple. [We are in fact surrounded by other people and 
are receiving from them influences far greater than we 
are generally willing to acknowledge to ourselves. 

These do not come only from childhood teaching and 
from direct teaching in later life. £Even what we regard 
as our own inner experiences, products of our self- 
determined mental life, are moulded very much by our 
social environmentT^Members of a society all tend to 
thrill with the same’emotions under the same circum¬ 
stances.^ J’ew religious phenomena are more uniform 
than the adolescent conversions of members of a 
religious body in which adolescent conversion is the 

16 



THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT IT 

correct thing^We find that all the members of such a 
community go through a long series of emotional ex¬ 
periences which they describe in almost exactly the 
same terms. Yet when we turn to another community 
which has not this tradition of adolescent conversions, 
these experiences are not found. They are, in the 
main, merely products of the conventions of the com¬ 
munity in which they were produced, and not (as we 
might easily have supposed) evidences of a deep-seated 
uniformity in human nature. 

Such a fact as this should warn us once again of the 
^artificiality of the classification with which we started. 

< The influence of our fellow men is not confined to the 
traditional element in religious belief, it also influences^ 
the element we have called the affective element 
^However useful we may find it to be for convenience in 
description, the classification would lead us astray if 
we attempted to interpret it too rigidly, j 

The method by which our beliefs are influenced by 
other people is not, on the whole, reasoned demonstra¬ 
tion. The child does not have the existence of God 
proved to it in its religious lessons. It is still true in 
later life that the simple affirmation of religious doc¬ 
trines by a person for whom we have respect, or the 
mere fact of the holding of such doctrines by the per¬ 
sons amongst whom we live, may have an authority 
over us compared with which the influence of the most 
convincing chain of reasoning is negligible. |The 
method by which beliefs are transmitted to us other¬ 
wise than by reasoned demonstration is by suggestion^1 
so for the understanding of this root of religious belief; 
it is necessary that we should study the psychology of 
suggestion. 

We may start with a description of suggestion in an 



18 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

extreme form. This was the earliest kind to be studied 
by psychologists. If a hypnotiser shows a hypnotised 
subject a plain pack of cards, and tells him that there is 
a photograph of his brother on one of them, he may 
succeed in making the subject see the photograph there, 
and continue to see that card as a photograph of his 
brother until the suggestion is removed. If the hypno¬ 
tiser tells him that he is an animal of some kind, he 
may begin to behave as if he were that animal. If he is 
told that in five minutes he will jump on his hat or 
perform some other ridiculous action, he often does so 
at the stated time; even though in the interval, he may 
have come out of the hypnotic state and be engaged in 
doing something else, quite unconscious of the com¬ 
mand he has received. These commands are called 
suggestions . In each case it will be noticed that an 
idea suggested by the hypnotiser has been realised by 
the subject as a perception, a belief, or an action. 

In ordinary life we do not meet with such striking 
phenomena as these. We cannot, for example, success¬ 
fully suggest to a normal person that he shall have a 
visual hallucination. At the same time, we do con¬ 
stantly find phenomena which differ from these only in 
degree. We find that ideas presented to us by other 
persons in the right way, frequently ripen in our minds 
until they result in an action or change of belief. A 
statement made in a confident manner by another 
person is often accepted by us without any rational 
ground for believing in its truth or in the credibility of 
the person making it. It is usual, at the present time, 
to extend the meaning of the word suggestion to in¬ 
clude such cases. Q\ 7 e may then define suggestion as 
a process oj communication resulting in the acceptance 
and realisation of a communicated idea in the absence 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT 19 

of adequate grounds for its acceptance .J^This is not 
quite the same as Dr McDougall’s definition given in 
his Social Psychology, since he makes suggestion result 
in the acceptance with conviction of a communicated 
proposition.jfirhis does not include the important cases 
of suggestion in which what is communicated is not a 
proposition but a feeling, state, or a course of action^ 
We will consider a typical case of suggestion in 
everyday life. We want to buy something in a shop. 
The salesman asks a price which we know is much in 
excess of the article’s true value. We question his 
price. He insists in a firm, confident manner that not 
only is he not overcharging us, but that he is asking 
less than the true value of the article and that he will 
lose heavily on the sale. He continues to repeat this, 
and in time it has happened to most of us that we have 
been talked over —the barrier put up by our intellects 
has been broken, the suggestion has taken effect, and 
we have bought the article. Later, when we have been 
out of reach of the salesman’s suggestions, we have 
realised (what we knew at first) that we have paid far 
more than our purchase was worth, and that we have 
been victims of a suggestion. It is clear that we have 
not argued that the salesman is probably telling the 
truth. On the contrary, we know that it is in his 
interest to be lying. His remark that he will lose on 
the sale is patently untrue. We have accepted his 
statement by no rational process, but by the process of 
suggestion—the acceptance and realisation by our 
minds of a suggested course of action simply because it 
has been proposed to us a sufficient number of times in 
a sufficiently confident manner. [Continued repetition 
and confidence in the manner of repeating are, in fact, 
the conditions of presenting a suggestion which most 


20 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

favour its success.^ There was a profound psychologi¬ 
cal truth in the logically inadmissible claim of the 
Bellman in The Hunting of the Snark that what he 
said three times was true. 

(We find that there are wide differences in the readi¬ 
ness with which suggestions are accepted by different 
persons and by the same person under different circum¬ 
stances. These are called differences in suggestibility. 
Suggestibility varies with age and sex; children are 
more suggestible than grown persons, and women are 
more suggestible than men. Hysteria is accompanied 
by a marked increase in suggestibility; while persons 
suffering from certain forms of insanity and from 
amentia (or idiocy) are very unsuggestibleTl 
^The state of half-waking which immediately pre¬ 
cedes or follows sleep is one in which suggestibility is 
very high. A similar condition can be induced arti¬ 
ficially, and is called light hypnosis or the hypnoidal 
state. Deep hypnosis is a state resembling sleep. Both 
of these are conditions of high suggestibility^] Hypno¬ 
sis can be induced by fixing the eyes on a bright point, 
such as the flame of a candle or the bright reflections 
in a crystal standing on a dark ground, by listening to 
a continuous or rhythmically varying sound, such as 
the ticking of a clock or the sound of waves breaking 
on the sea-shore, or by rhythmical passes performed by 
someone else before the subject’s face and body. It can 
also be produced simply by suggestion in a sufficiently 
suggestible subject. The operator has only to order 
such a subject to sleep, and he immediately falls into 
the hypnotic sleep. 

The characteristics of a slight degree of hypnosis may 
be tested without difficulty by anyone. Fix your eyes 
on a bright spot of light, preferably on a dark back- 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT 


21 


ground. As you keep your eyes fixed, you find that the 
surrounding objects become misty and dark. Your 
mind seems to become empty, and you grow more and 
more drowsy. Your eyelids wish to close and you may 
allow them to do so. You are now in the condition of 
light hypnosis. The experiment will succeed best if 
you are alone and free from external distractions. 

The psychological characteristics of the hypnotic 
state will be dealt with in greater detail in a later chap¬ 
ter, when we discuss different forms of what is called 
mental prayer. The only character which is of im¬ 
portance to us at present is that it is a state of increased 
suggestibility. It is for this reason that hypnosis finds 
its use in psychiatry. It was at one time usual, when a 
doctor wished to treat a patient by suggestion, to put 
him into the hypnotic trance; more usually at the 
present time he is put only into the state of light 
hypnosis. In either case, the object is to increase the 
patient’s suggestibility so that the curative suggestions 
ofjthe doctor may more readily take effect. 

[Suggestibility is heightened by practice^ A person 
who has been put frequently into the hypnotic state 
becomes increasingly suggestible. Dr Rivers has 
pointed out, for example, that the object of military 
drill is to heighten the suggestibility of the private 
soldiers so that they may respond immediately and 
unquestioningly to the commands of their officers. 1 

[The success of a suggestion also depends on how far 
it conflicts with the mental organisation of the person 
receiving it—with his principles, prejudices, etc. 
will be received with difficulty if he has a well-organised 
system of balief or of principles of conduct with which 
it conflicts. [It will be received most readily if there is 

1 Appendix to Instinct and the Unconscious, Cambridge, 1921. 


22 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

previously existing in his mind a disposition to accept 
it.jflt is not true (although it is often stated) that, 
even under hypnosis, a man can never be made to do 
anything he believes to be morally wrong. His accept¬ 
ance of a suggestion depends also on other factors, very 
largely on how far he believes he will be absolutely 
passive in the hands of the operator. ^Experiment has 
shown that it is sometimes possible successfully to 
suggest lines of conduct completely at variance with 
the moral principles of the subject, although more 
usually they are accepted with difficulty or not at all. 1 

[The suggestibility of the same subject also varies 
with the operatorAnything that increases the pres¬ 
tige of the operator increases the suggestibility of the 
subject to him. Eove, and to a less extent fear, of the 
operator will increase the suggestibility of the subject.^ 
^An attitude of dependence and heightened suggestibil¬ 
ity in an extreme form, showing some of the character¬ 
istics of normal love, has recently been distinguished 
by the psychoanalysts under the name of positive 
transjerence?\ Transference may result from hypnotic 
treatment, and its occurrence is one objection to that 
treatment in mental therapy. It is also found in treat¬ 
ment by psychoanalysis, but the psychoanalysts claim 
that they have improved on the practice of hypnotism 
because they use the transference in the cure of their 
patients and are able to get rid of it afterwards. It 
appears that in transference we meet with a regression 
to the childish attitude of dependence on the parent, 
but with some other person substituted for the parent, 
and with the relationship complicated by a tendency to 
the emotional attitude proper to a grown person. 

Qontrasuggestion is the name given to the process 
opposite to suggestion. ^7 In this, the tendency is to 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT 23 

reject a proposition advanced by another person. 
There are people to whom it is sufficient to remark that 
it is a fine day, to provoke the response that it is a 
most unpleasant day, even though they may have had 
no thoughts about the weather at all until the remark 
was made. Persons to whom the attitude of contra- 
suggestion has become habitual are what we call 
cranks, [it has been suggested by Dr Prideaux 1 that 
this is a case of what is called over compensation for a 
tendency to accept suggestions too readily. J 
We have not, however, exhausted the subject of 
suggestion when we have described it as a consciously 
produced actionjof the mind of a single person on that 
of another. /There is a tendency amongst modern 
psychologists-^.^. Dr Rivers in Instinct and the Un¬ 
conscious and Mr Trotter in Instincts of the Herd in 
Peace and War —to emphasise the importance of what 
they call herd-suggestion, i.e. the suggestions which a 
member of a society is constantly receiving from the 
rest of the same societyjlt determines the close simi¬ 
larity in thought and belief of different members of a 
group. It supplies the sanction behind the conven¬ 
tional code of morality. To it are due the waves of 
feeling which pass over a whole country, such as the 
anger which is felt when a country is attacked or 
insulted. /The greater part of the very large mass of 
opinions which a man has not thought out for himself, 
he owes to the influence of herd-suggestion?] Even in 
the opinions which he believes he has thought out, he 
is not free from its effects. methods of thought, 
the things he has assumed as axiomatic, are all more or 
less determined for him by the society in which he finds 

1 “Suggestion and Suggestibility,” by E. Prideaux. The British 
Journal of Psychology, 1919-20. 


24* THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

himself. Thus herd-suggestion is a powerful force 
influencing the formation of belief to an extent greater 
than most people are willing to admit. 

{/There is a third variety of suggestion called auto¬ 
suggestion, in which th^ idea suggested is originated 
by the subject himself. T propose to reserve the dis¬ 
cussion of this for a future chapter. 

The bearing of what has been said about suggestion 
and hypnosis on the teaching of religion is very great. 
Suggestion clearly plays a very large part in religious 
teaching. I am convinced too that the unintended 
production of the hypnoidal state is present in religious 
services to a much greater extent than is ordinarily 
recognised by writers on the psychology of religion. 
Let us consider the various methods of increasing sug¬ 
gestibility and see how far they are found in religion. 
The prestige of the preacher is increased by the wear¬ 
ing of distinctive clothes. The suggestibility of the 
hearer is increased by finding himself one of a crowd. 
This effect is heightened in such a service as that of the 
Salvation Army by the ejaculations with which the 
congregation show their sympathy with what is being 
said by the preacher. The following things may be 
present which are liable to induce the hypnoidal state: 
a monotonous voice in the reading of the service, the 
rhythmical sound of the music, and the points of light 
produced by lighted candles. I do not wish to be so far 
misunderstood as to be supposed to mean that these 
things are deliberately introduced into services in order 
to induce the hypnoidal state. But that is their ten¬ 
dency in fact, and it is possible that it is to this ten¬ 
dency that they owe their value as adjuncts to the 
religious service. 

I was recently present at a Salvation Army service 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT 25 

which provides a very fine example of the unwitting 
use of suggestion, and of the use of the hypnoidal con¬ 
dition in order to increase suggestibility. It took place 
in a theatre. At the end of the service, people were 
invited to come up to the mercy seat on the stage in 
order to seek consecration. On the stage, one of the 
leaders was repeating in confident and slightly monot¬ 
onous tones: “Jesus calls you. Come. Come. Come 
now. Come. Come now. . . .” The congregation 
were asked to bow their heads and to sing with their 
eyes closed. The closed eyes, the monotonous singing, 
and the repetition of the word “Come” on the stage, all 
tended to produce in the audience a state approaching 
the hypnoidal. The same verse was sung over and over 
again by the congregation, and it too contained the 
same suggestion as was being urged from the stage—it 
contained some such words as I give myself to Jesus. 
The effect of this suggestion was a powerful one, and 
it succeeded in breaking down the resistance of several 
of the congregation to the act of making a public decla¬ 
ration by stepping on to the stage. 

good deal of nonsense is talked by people who seem 
to think that it is a reproach peculiar to the teaching of 
religion that it is very largely a non-rational process— 
suggestion under conditions of heightened suggestibil¬ 
ity. That is true of most teaching." Even in rational 
demonstration, it seems probable that the conviction 
with which a proposition is received owes a great deal 
to suggestion over and above the influence of the per¬ 
ceived rigidity of its proof J Perhaps the conditions of 
teaching furthest removed from those of the pulpit are 
to be found in the university class-room, where one 
wishes to train the students to think for themselves, 
and the lecturer endeavours not to present conclusions 



26 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

but to state alternatives and to give due weight to 
facts on both sides. But even here, it will be found 
that so far as he is communicating his opinions to his 
class, he is using suggestion. He is not generally en¬ 
gaged in proving his opinions, but in affirming them in 
a confident tone. If he thinks that the class will have 
difficulty in accepting what he says, he does not multi¬ 
ply proofs; he affirms it again in a more confident tone. 
It is true that his class is not in a state of mind even 
approaching the hypnoidal. On the contrary he hopes 
that their minds are alert and active. But then we 
must notice that his aim is very different from that of 
the religious teacher. The lecturer wants his class to 
accept only so much of what he is saying that they will 
become interested in his subject, if possible along the 
lines he is indicating. The religious teacher wishes his 
congregation to follow him further than that. He 
rightly feels that the attitude of open-mindedness, and 
critical agnosticism, which is the right one to adopt 
towards a scientific theory, has litttle value when ap¬ 
plied to the problem of the being of God, with all its 
implications for devotional and moral practice. So 
far, however, as the scientific lecturer does wish his 
audience to accept what he says, he uses on the 
whole the same method as the religious teacher—sug¬ 
gestion. 

The use of suggestions a normal process in teaching, 
but^it has its dangers.Jjtn the first place, it is clear that 
the more a teacher d$ends on suggestion and the less 
he utilises the reasoning power of his followers, the 
graver is his moral responsibility for seeing that what 
he teaches is true' Secondly, there is a danger of 
attaching too high a valuation to an unreasoning ac¬ 
ceptance of what is taught."TThis encourages an atti- 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT 27 

tude of suggestibility and dependence, with consequent 
weakening of the subject’s character. Such a passively 
accepted religion, which has no grounding in the expe¬ 
rience of the worshippers and has not won the alle¬ 
giance of their reasoning powers, tends to be super¬ 
ficial. We might fairly describe such a religion as of 
the traditional type. ^There are, thirdly, dangers con¬ 
nected with transference~tO the ministerTYThose of my 
readers who have understood what I saia about trans¬ 
ference earlier in this chapter will have no difficulty in 
calling to mind a multitude of cases of transference to 
religious teachers within their own experience. The 
curate, for example, who is embarrassed by the number 
of unnecessary presents he receives from members of 
his congregation is a victim of transference. The wise 
minister of religion, of course, knows what to do with 
it. Like the psychoanalyst, he uses it for the strength¬ 
ening of the subject’s autonomy of character, and thus 
makes it destroy itself. But unhappily, the weakness, 
vanity, or folly of the minister can too easily make such 
a transference end in disaster. 

The danger of an overvaluation of the attitude of 
passive acceptance of authority, and the consequent 
production of religion of the traditional type, is a very 
real one. A church which, in practice, says to the vast 
majority of its worshippers: “Do not think, do not 
bother about your feelings, simply believe and obey; in 
that is the highest merit,” is justly suspected by those 
who feel their autonomy of character to be a precious 
thing. 

A dreadful example of the exaltation of this attitude 
in religion comes from a little book called Stories of 
Grace. Obviously, the author of the book tells it as a 
very edifying story. It is as follows: 


28 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

At the conclusion of a sermon by the revivalist, Mr 
Brownlow North, a young man asked to see him. 
Addressing Mr North, he said, “I have heard your ser¬ 
mon, sir, and I have heard you preach often now, and 
I neither care for you nor your preaching, unless you 
can tell me, Why did God permit sin in the world?’’ 
“Then I’ll tell you,” the preacher at once replied. “God 
permitted sin because He chose to do so.”. . .“Because 
He chose it,” he repeated as the objector stood speech¬ 
less, and added, “If you continue to question and cavil 
at God’s dealings and, vainly puffed up by your own 
carnal mind, strive to be wise above what is written, I 
will tell you something more that God will choose to 
do. He will some day choose to put you into hell! It 
is vain, sir, for a man to strive with his Maker; you 
cannot resist Him; and neither your opinion of His 
dealings nor your blasphemous expressions of them will 
in the least lessen the pain of your everlasting dam¬ 
nation.” 

As a consequence of this conversation and by reading 
a chapter of the Bible recommended by North, the 
young man became converted, and a week later ex¬ 
pressed himself thus: 

I am happy, oh! so happy, sir; and though the devil 
comes sometimes to tempt me with my old thoughts 
and to ask me what reason I have to think God has for¬ 
given me, I have always managed to get him away by 
telling him that I do not want to judge things any 
longer by my own reason, but by God’s word . 1 

r Corresponding to this danger in practice, of too high 
a valuation of the traditional element in religious 
belief, there is a danger of one-sidedness in psycho¬ 
logical theory resulting from a too exclusive attention 
jto the part played by this element in the formation of 

V Stories of Grace, by the Rev. C. S. Isaacson, pp. 104, 105 and 106. 


THE TRADITIONAL ELEMENT 29 

Relief to the neglect of others. In the discussion of 
religious belief in such psychological theory, exclusive 
importance is attached to its ancestry, and the signifi¬ 
cance both of its value for experience and its justifica¬ 
tion by reason tends to be forgotten. This danger may 
be illustrated by the school in Comparative Religions 
which feels that it has given a sufficient account of 
pantheism when it has said that it is primitive man’s 
fetishism made systematic, and is satisfied that it has 
disposed for ever of the Christian doctrine of the 
Atonement by saying that it is simply the survival of 
very primitive ideas about human sacrifice. This is 
clearly an inadequate account of any belief, and as¬ 
sumes that there is in its formation only one element— 
the traditional element. The survival of a belief is 
determined by its value for the experience of the people 
amongst whom it has survived, and by the appeal it 
makes to their intellectualising powers. The idea of 
vicarious sacrifice embodied in the Atonement has sur¬ 
vived amongst civilised people because it has had a 
value for their experience, and because it has not been 
found by them to be intellectually impossible. These 
also are the factors which have determined its survival, 
and not merely the fact that it has happened to be 
handed down. 


CHAPTER III 


THE NATURAL ELEMENT IN 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

In our classification of the conscious roots of religious 
belief we distinguished three kinds of experience which 
the religious man found to be harmonised by his belief 
in God. The first of these we described shortly as the 
experience of the external world. In more detail, this 
was the experience of beneficence, harmony and beauty 
in conflict with their opposites—malevolence, disorder 
and ugliness. We must not, of course, make the mis¬ 
take of supposing that the man who finds in such 
experience a confirmation of his religious belief formu¬ 
lates this mental process to himself in the clear-cut 
manner in which we are doing it now. When we try to 
express the step from experience of the external world 
to a belief in God in intellectual terms, we are in 
danger of forgetting that, in the beginning, it may not 
be an intellectual process at all. Everyone will remem¬ 
ber the illustration with which Paley’s Natural Theol¬ 
ogy starts. He supposes that a man has picked up a 
watch in a desert place, and, noticing its differences 
from such a natural object as a stone—the subordina¬ 
tion of all the parts to a common end, etc.—concludes 
that it was made by a man. Yet Paley does not really 
wish us to suppose that the man goes through the 
chain of reasoning described before he says to himself 
that the watch is a product of human workmanship. 
If we were to challenge the man’s statement it is prob- 

30 



THE NATURAL ELEMENT 31 

able that he would justify it by going through that 
chain of reasoning, but in actual fact his inference from 
the character of the watch to its human workmanship 
probably contained no steps of logical thinking at all. 
In the same way, a vague feeling of a particular kind 
about the world may be the raw material for belief in a 
Creator. Later, when the belief which has grown out 
of the feeling has been questioned, it begins to take an 
intellectual form. An experience is something lived 
through and felt; it is purely individual and incommu¬ 
nicable. Religion, being social, cannot rest content 
with an incommunicable basis; so its experiences must 
be translated into words. They must be made to pass 
from the region of indirect phantasy-thinking in which 
they have their origin, to the region of directed com¬ 
municable thinking in words. This translation into 
words is the intellectualisation of the experience which 
gives birth to a religious doctrine. The doctrine never 
fully expresses the experience, for an emotion cannot 
be communicated to another by the vehicle of a form 
of words as satisfactorily as can an intellectual 
idea. For this reason, persons with the strongest re¬ 
ligious feelings often feel most acutely the inade¬ 
quacy of attempts to put them into intellectual 
form. These are inclined to trust their feelings while 
they distrust any attempt to formulate them in 
dogma. 

We may usefully begin our study of this experience 
by looking for descriptions of the feeling itself before it 
has become translated into a positive belief. We can 
find these plentifully in the prose and poetry of all 
those persons vaguely called nature mystics. I will 
first quote a well-known extract from the chapter on 
Solitude in Thoreau’s Walden: 


32 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


In the midst of a gentle rain ... I was suddenly 
sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, 
in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight 
and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccount¬ 
able friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sus¬ 
taining me, as made the fancied advantages of human 
neighbourhood insignificant, and I have never thought 
of them since. Every little pine-needle expanded and 
swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so 
distinctly made aware of something kindred to me 
even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild 
and dreary . . . that I thought no place could ever 
be strange to me again. 

A similar feeling is expressed by Goethe in the 
second letter of Werther: 

Wenn das liebe Tal um mich dampft und die hohe 
Sonne an der Oberflache der undurchdringlichen Fin- 
sternis meines Waldes ruht und nur einzelne Strahlen 
sich in das innere Heiligtum stehlen, ich dann im hohen 
Grase am fallenden Bache liege und naher an der Erde 
tausend mannigfaltige Graschen mir merkwiirdig wer- 
den; wenn ich das Wimmeln der kleinen Welt 
zwischen Halmen, die unzahligen unergriindlichen 
Gestalten der Wiirmchen, der Miickchen naher an 
meinem Herzen fiihle, und fuhle die Gegenwart des 
Allmachtigen, der uns nach seinem Bilde schuf, das 
Wehen des All-Liebenden, der uns in ewiger Wonne 
schwebend tragt und erhalt; mein Freund! wenn’s 
dann um meine Augen dammert und die Welt um mich 
her und der Himmel ganz in meiner Seele ruht wie die 
Gestalt einer Geliebten 1 . . . 

1 Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther. “When the dear valley 
is filled with mist about me, and the high sun rests above the 
impenetrable gloom of my wood, only single rays stealing into the 
inner sanctuary, when I lie in the tall grass beside the tumbling 
brook and nearer the ground a thousand varied blades of grass 
attract my attention; when the hurry and skurry of the little world 


THE NATURAL ELEMENT 33 

This feeling of awe and reverence towards Nature is 
also condensed by Goethe into a short phrase when he 
makes the Earth-Spirit describe his activities to Faust 
as the weaving of der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid. 

Relevant examples from Wordsworth—from The 
Prelude and Lines composed a jew miles above Tintern 
Abbey —are too well known to need repetition here. 
An excellent example of a poetic account of this expe¬ 
rience (which is not interpreted theistically) is also 
found in Swinburne’s A Nympholept: 

The whole wood feels thee, the whole air fears thee: 
but fear 

So deep, so dim, so sacred, is wellnigh sweet. 

For the light that hangs and broods on the woodlands 
here, 

Intense, invasive, intolerant, imperious, and meet 
To lighten the works of thine hands and the ways of 
thy feet, 

Is hot with the fire of the breath of thy life, and dear 
As hope that shrivels and shrinks not for frost or heat. 

But the poet questions the optimistic intellectualisa- 
tion of the experience which is made by the religious 
believer. The beauty of Nature is on the surface of his 
experience, but not the goodness demanded by a belief 
in God. 

Thee, therefore, thee would I come to, cleave to, cling, 
If haply thy heart be kind and thy gifts be good, 
Unknown sweet spirit, whose vesture is soft in spring, 
In summer splendid. . . . 

among the stalks, the innumerable incomprehensible shapes of the 
tiny worms and gnats are near to my heart, and I feel the presence 
of the Almighty who created us after His own image, the breath of 
the All-loving who upholds and sustains us in eternal bliss, my 
friend, when my eyes become dim and the world about me and the 
heavens are imprinted on my soul like the image of a loved one...” 


34 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

The experience which these passages are trying to 
describe is an emotional relationship to natural objects 
which is of the same kind as that which we feel towards 
a person. The natural world is felt to be, not a chance 
arrangement of non-sentient objects, but as something 
with which the observer may have intimate personal 
relations—something towards wdiieh he may feel love 
or awe. One is tempted to say that this experience 
leads to pantheism, but this is probably too simple to 
be entirely true. It would seem to be more accurate to 
say that this experience leads to the positive element in 
pantheism—the doctrine of immanence. Pantheism 
however contains also a negative element in the denial 
of the transcendence of its god. If combined with a 
doctrine of the transcendence of God (supplied by 
reflection on other types of religious experience) this 
experience may lead to theism of a kind familiar in 
Christianity. 

We do in fact find numerous theistic descriptions of 
it. In the account of his conversion, Brother Lawrence 
says: 

That in the winter, seeing a tree stripped of its 
leaves, and considering that within a little time, the 
leaves would be renewed, and after that the flowers 
and fruit appear, he received a high view of the Provi¬ 
dence and Power of God, which has never since been 
effaced from his soul . 1 

A description of a similar state by a narrator of a 
very different kind is found in the following account of 
a conversion in Starbuck’s book: 

It was like entering another world—a new state of 
existence. Natural objects were glorified. My spiritual 

1 The Practice of the Presence of God, by Brother Lawrence, 
First Conversation. 


THE NATURAL ELEMENT 


35 


vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in e\ery 
material object in the universe. The woods were vocal 
with heavenly music . 1 

It is instructive also to notice the patterns of reli¬ 
gious temperament in which this type of experience is 
absent. We may suppose that to a mentality hostile 
to the idea of divine immanence in Nature the experi¬ 
ence would not occur, or if it did, it would be imme¬ 
diately suppressed as something illusory or evil. This 
hostility may, no doubt, merely be the result of theo¬ 
logical or philosophical prejudices against such a doc¬ 
trine as that of divine immanence; but the wide range 
of religious thought in which any doctrine expressing 
this experience is totally absent suggests a deeper 
reason than this. A hint of what this reason may be 
can be found in the poem quoted above. The idea that 
God expresses Himself in the beauty of Nature implies 
an optimistic attitude towards the external world. To 
the unreflective man, healthy in mind and body, and 
not much burdened by ultimate moral problems, this 
attitude is a natural one. For him there is no conflict 
when he sees Nature as the face of God. The matter 
is however different with the sensitive soul of the 
Buddha, tortured by the sight of the misery and cruelty 
of the world, or of St Paul, acutely conscious of sin in 
himself and in mankind. To such mentalities, Nature 
is not good. For them, the experience we are describ¬ 
ing would come into conflict with the stronger experi¬ 
ence of the reality of pain or evil . 2 

This may perhaps account for its absence from the 
Gospels and from that ascetic school of Christianity of 

^tarbuck, The Psychology of Religion, p. 120. 

2 Itself rationalised in the Vedantic doctrine of the external world 
as illusion, and in the Christian doctrines of Creation and the Devil. 


36 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


which the example best known to English readers is 
St Thomas a Kempis. We seem indeed to find in some 
Christian ascetics a deliberate repression of any emo¬ 
tional attitude towards Nature. They hide their faces 
from its beauty lest it should make them love purely 
natural things and so steal their hearts from God. 
“Men draw thither,” says St Augustine, “to admire the 
heights of the mountains and the powerful waves of 
the sea—and to turn away from themselves.” 

This repulsion from natural beauty is expressed also 
by St Catherine of Genoa in her Vita: 

The sun, which at first seemed so clear to me, now 
seems obscure; what used to seem sweet to me, now 
seems bitter: because all beauties and all sweetnesses 
that have an admixture of the creature are corrupt 
and spoilt . 1 

We have so far been discussing this feeling for the 
external world as a vague whole without asking 
whether it may not be possible to analyse it into 
simpler elements. There are three constituent parts in 
this experience which may readily be distinguished. 
These are the experiences of beneficence, of harmony 
and of beauty. We will consider these three parts 
separately, taking beneficence first. 

Some things in Nature appear to be favourable to 
man—gentle warmth, seasonable rains, domestic ani¬ 
mals and all the numerous accidents which preserve 
his life or increase his happiness. Others seem un¬ 
favourable to him—extreme heat and cold, tempests, 
wild beasts and all disastrous and uncomfortable hap¬ 
penings. It is not unnatural for him to see in the 
former the works of a being who loves him, and in the 

1 Baron F. von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion (London, 
1909), quoting Vita, p. 23 c. 


THE NATURAL ELEMENT 37 

latter the handiwork of a being who is opposed to him. 
This gives us the raw material for a very simple reli¬ 
gion. It is, we may notice, purely anthropocentric. It 
is also dualistic. There is a sharp division between the 
province of its god and the realm opposed to him. 
Moreover, it is a dualism on a low plane—the plane of 
simple and natural human desires. 

We must not expect to find this element developed 
alone in any religion which has as its object more than 
the satisfaction of man’s bodily desires. It has been 
suggested that early Persian religion is very nearly on 
this level. But it is found as an element in even the 
most developed religions. It is the element in religion 
which is connoted by the word Providence. It is not 
absent from the more developed religions until we 
reach a high level of mysticism. At that level we find 
St Catherine of Genoa exclaiming: “I will not name 
myself either for good or for evil, lest this my (selfish) 
part should esteem itself to be something.” 1 Yet it is 
an element the abandonment of which would leave 
ordinary religion the poorer. It repels us when we 
meet it in an exaggerated form. God must be more 
even to the most primitive faith than an efficient uni¬ 
versal provider. William James, in his Varieties of 
Religious Experience , gives the following extract from 
the narrative of an English prisoner of war on a French 
ship who attacked the crew, killed two, and made the 
rest prisoner: 

I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to 
strike them withal. But seeing nothing, I said, “Lord! 
what shall I do?” Then casting up my eye upon my 
left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I jerked 

1 Baron F. von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion (London, 
1909), p. 269. 



38 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


my right arm and took hold, and struck the point four 
times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull 
of that man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the 
Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away from 
him.] But through God’s wonderful providence it 
either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, 
and at this time the Almighty God gave me strength 
enough to take one man in one hand, and throw at 
the other’s head: and looking about again to see any¬ 
thing to strike them withal, but seeing nothing, I said, 
“Lord! what shall I do now?” And then it pleased 
God to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And 
although two of the men had hold of my right arm, 
yet God Almighty strengthened me so that I put my 
right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife 
and sheath, . . . put it between my legs and drew it 
out, and then cut the man’s throat with it that had 
his back to my breast : and he immediately dropt down, 
and scarce ever stirred after. 1 

The revulsion which we feel against the religious 
attitude of the narrator of this story is not because the 
element of religion which is the dominant one in his 
mind—the attitude towards God as Providence—is an 
unhealthy one. It is because that element has become 
exaggerated, and this exaggeration has resulted in an 
attitude towards religion which we recognise as primi¬ 
tive and infantile. 

Even in his experience of the external world, the 
ordinary religious man sees more in God than a mere 
provider for human needs. There seems to be in the 
world a harmony and purpose quite apart from his 
human requirements. The kind of thing that is meant 
may be best illustrated from Paley’s Natural Theology. 
As psychologists we may use Paley as a guide in these 

1 Varieties of Religious Experience (London, 1903), p. 471. 



THE NATURAL ELEMENT 39 

matters without enquiring into the rigidity of his 
proofs. When Paley says that he can prove conclu¬ 
sively the existence of God by a consideration of the 
adaptations of organisms, we are not as psychologists 
interested in whether or not his proof is sound. What 
we are interested in is the fact that he has shown us 
one way by which the mind of man has passed from 
the external world to the idea of God. The intellec- 
tualisation of this step may be totally unsound. The 
step itself is a psychological fact, and I suppose it to be 
a fact before it is intellectualised. So, when Paley 
deduces from the mutual adaptations of the parts of 
organisms and from the adaptation of organisms to 
their environment that they were created by a per¬ 
sonal designer, we may conclude that this feeling that 
the world appears like a manufactured article is one 
root of religious belief. In other words, we conclude 
that in the religious man’s experience of the external 
world, harmony as well as beneficence plays a part in 
the building up of his religious belief. 

Thirdly, there is the experience of beauty in the 
world. To many people this is not strong; to others 
the world seems to be wonderfully and unnecessarily 
beautiful. They do not feel, as did Paley, that the 
world is like a watch. It seems to them to be more like 
a picture. Not only are they sure that it was made by 
someone, but also that it was made by someone whose 
thoughts and feelings they are able in some way to 
share. 

It would be possible indefinitely to multiply quota¬ 
tions descriptive of this feeling from a source I have 
already used—the writings of nature mysticism. We 
will be content, however, with a single passage of a 
different kind. It is the narrative of the beginning of a 


40 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

man’s religious life told by Dr Dale in his Christian 
Doctrine: 

I was living in a small town in one of the southern 
counties of England, and one Sunday afternoon I went 
out into the country for a stroll. It was summer, and 
after walking for a few miles I lay down on the side of 
a hill. I saw, stretching to the distant horizon, mead¬ 
ows and orchards and cornfields; the cloudless skies 
were gloriously blue, and the sun was flooding earth 
and heaven with splendour. The wonderful beauty 
filled me with excitement and delight. And then sud¬ 
denly, through all that I saw, there came the very glory 
of God. I knew that He was there. His presence, His 
power, and His goodness took possession of me and 
held me for hours. 

This experience of beauty has been given intellectual 
form by philosophers in a demonstrative argument 
from the presence of beauty in the world to a cause 
adequate to account for it. This is generally known as 
the Aesthetic Argument. As in speaking of Paley’s 
argument from design, I do not propose to discuss the 
validity of this argument, but merely to note it as a 
confirmation of the fact that this experience is one root 
of the belief in God. 

Whether or not it can be justified by reason as valid, 
the passage from these experiences of beneficence, har¬ 
mony and beauty to Theism, i.e. to a belief in God, is a 
natural one. If things in the world seem to be, on the 
whole, arranged so as to be favourable to the needs of 
man, what is more natural than that he should conclude 
that it is arranged by someone who is taking care of 
him. If things seem, on the whole, to be ordered on an 
intelligible plan, what is more natural than for him to 
conclude that there is an intelligent designer of the 


THE NATURAL ELEMENT 41 

universe. If beauty appears in the world, what is more 
natural than for him to suppose that this beauty is the 
expression of a personal being. In each case, we may 
say that the belief in God is an intellectualisation of the 
experience. It is the simplest possible explanation of 
the experience in intellectual terms. 

There is one characteristic of the Theism reached by 
these experiences which we must notice. It is, in each 
case, dualistic. That is, its conception of God defi¬ 
nitely excludes part of experience, a part which is 
regarded as hostile to His nature. This hostile part 
consists of the elements of malevolence, disorder and 
ugliness. By the element of malevolence, I mean all in 
nature that is opposed to man’s well-being—extreme 
temperatures, wild beasts and unfortunate accidents. 
By disorder, all those things in the world which seem 
to show an absence of design. The whole drama of life, 
with one animal preying on another, the capriciousness 
and indifference to merit of the fate of individuals (as 
it is depicted, for example, in Hardy’s novels) and 
lastly the vision which physical science offers to us of 
the whole universe ending in a lifeless, meaningless 
condition of uniform temperature, gives a total picture 
of waste and disorder at least as spontaneously impres¬ 
sive as the world of design depicted by Paley. There 
are also the elements in the world which seem, at first 
sight, to be products of an evil design: the disgusting 
limbless parasite which shows the same admirable 
adaptation to its environment as that of the nobler 
animals over which the enthusiasm of the eighteenth 
century religious apologists was poured, and the in¬ 
creased capacity for suffering and inflicting pain which 
has accompanied the growth of self-consciousness in 
man. Lastly, there is the element of ugliness to be 


42 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

found in all those aspects of the universe which seem 
to us to be sordid, unlovely and revolting. 

Religious belief, therefore, so far as it is drawn from 
this element of experience will certainly be dualistic. 
God will have a real element in the world opposed to 
him. Of course, this dualism may be modified (as it is 
in all developed religions) by other experience or by 
reflective thought. We are not at present concerned 
with this modification. 

Any optimistic Theistic belief (and, in practice, 
nearly all religion is found to be optimistic) will have 
the conviction that these opposed elements in the 
universe will be overcome. In Zarathustrianism, for 
example, it was believed that 

finally, the powers of good and evil will engage in a last 
conflict. Ahriman and the evil host will be cast into 
the stream of molten metal. Then will the whole world 
be purified, the whole universe filled with Ahura Maz¬ 
da’s being, and all that lives will pass into immortality 
and celestial perfection . 1 

But this optimism is not provided by the experience 
we are discussing. It comes into religion through some 
other element of experience or perhaps through some 
process of reasoning. So long as we remain on the 
plane of experience of the external world, we have an 
unresolved dualism. 

But these experiences which we may call evil (re¬ 
membering that we are using the word evil without 
any moral meaning) may do more than provide an 
opposing element in religious belief. They appear to 
some minds so to predominate that they provide the 
material for an atheistic interpretation of the universe 
or (if theism has been reached through the other roots 

1 Comparative Religion, by F. B. Jevon (Cambridge, 1913), p. 101. 


43 


THE NATURAL ELEMENT 

of religious belief) for a theism which is pessimistic 
towards this world. . . . 

This reaction towards the world is illustrated by the 
story of the early religious life of the Buddha, He had 
led a happy and peaceful life in a palace. Then during 
a drive he was brought face to face with disease, old 
age and death. Henceforth, these seemed to him to be 
the predominant facts of the world, and he was led to 
an attitude deeply pessimistic and effectively atheistic. 
As more modern examples, two widely read English 
authors may be taken. Hardy, in his novels, depicts 
the capriciousness with which a fate indifferent to 
human happiness and human merit crushes and de¬ 
stroys a noble character, and he ironically represents 
this as the sport of the President of the Immortals. 
Sir Francis Younghusband in a book called Within, 
describes how his faith in God was destroyed by a pain¬ 
ful accident, and details the other facts of the universe 
which seem to him to make the hypothesis of a benevo¬ 
lent God an untenable intellectualisation. 

The possibility of such a reaction shows an obvious 
weakness in this element of religious belief, but there is 
no sufficient reason for denying its importance in con¬ 
junction with other elements. The people in whom it 
has been strongest have indeed often been content to 
ignore part of their experience of the world in order to 
build up a religious faith from its more pleasant 
aspects. Particularly is this true of the religious apol¬ 
ogists who have provided a demonstration of the exist¬ 
ence of God by the complacent enumeration of the 
pleasant features of the world. But, at the same time, 
we must notice that this element in religion has been 
strong in many who have by no means closed their eyes 
to the unpleasant side of the world. The example 



44 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

which most readily occurs to the mind is St Francis, to 
whom the world appeared to be full of God although he 
deliberately put himself in touch with its most un¬ 
pleasant aspects. 

After discussing each of the roots of religious belief, 
we may usefully enquire into the type of religion in 
which it receives undue prominence. The type of 
religious belief which results from such an exaggeration 
of the natural element may be found in the form of 
Natural Religion which was in vogue about the middle 
of the last century. Its weakness as a religious belief 
was shown by the ease with which it degenerated into 
a merely sentimental attitude towards the pleasant 
aspects of the world, without real feeling for God as 
transcendent, and deficient in moral value. A similar 
example in which one part only of this element is 
exaggerated is to be found in those whose religious 
convictions are built exclusively on the foundation of 
natural beauty. The weakness of such a support when 
it is made exclusively to bear the weight of our deepest 
convictions has been illustrated by Professor Caldecott 
(I do not know with what justice) by the following 
passage written by Ruskin towards the end of his life: 

Morning breaks, as I write, along these Coniston 
Fells, and the level mists, motionless and gray beneath 
the gorse of the moorlands, veil the lower woods and 
the sleeping village and the long lawns by the lake 
shore. Oh that someone had but told me in my youth, 
when all my heart seemed to be set in those colours and 
clouds, that appear for a little while and then vanish 
away, how little my love of them would serve me, when 
the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning 
should be completed; and all my thoughts should be 
of those whom, by neither, I was to meet more. 


CHAPTER IV 


THE MORAL ELEMENT IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

In the last chapter we were discussing experiences of 
the outside world which tended to result in the con¬ 
firmation of religious belief. The experience to which 
I propose to draw your attention in the present chapter 
is of a conflict which exists in the mind itself—the 
moral conflict. This is the conflict which results from 
the fact that the individual finds his own immediate de¬ 
sires opposed by an outside requirement—the moral law. 

Before going any further it may be as well to notice 
that we are not concerned in psychology with the 
questions which would be raised at this stage in a 
philosophical treatment of ethics. It does not matter 
to us what the moral law is—whether it is at bottom a 
codification of the requirements of society, or whether 
it is something quite independent of any sort of utility 
and existing as really and independently as the outside 
world. It is sufficient for us to be satisfied that the 
conflict is a genuine psychological fact, and that it is an 
important one. For the sake of convenience we will 
call the system of forces reacting against our own 
immediate desires in the moral conflict; the moral law. 
Nothing that we say about the moral conflict will in 
any way be altered if we regard the moral law as merely 
a summary of the requirements of society, if we regard 
it as something real and independent, or if we adopt 
some other possible theory about it. 

The moral conflict is not dependent on religious faith 

45 



46 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

in such a way that without religious faith it would 
disappear. It is often stated that it is, but I have never 
heard any reason given for this opinion which seemed 
sufficiently strong to outweigh the empirical fact that 
in the minds of persons who have lost their religious 
faith, the moral conflict is found to exist after their loss 
as it did before. 

The experience of the moral conflict does, however, 
tend to result in religious belief, and this in two ways. 
When a man feels the conflict strongly he tends to 
objectify the two sides of it, and he objectifies the 
forces on the side of moral goodness as God. Other 
people seem to pass from the moral conflict to a belief 
in God by the practical necessity they feel for a belief 
in God in order that they may be kept good at all. 
These are two quite distinct methods of reaching relig¬ 
ious belief from the moral conflict, and it only leads to 
confusion of thought to fail to distinguish them. 

The first method of passing from the moral conflict 
to religion is quite plainly the same mental process as 
we were considering in the last chapter. It is an intel- 
lectualisation (or rationalisation) of an experience. 
The belief that the good side of the moral conflict is the 
expression of the will of some being who is infinitely 
good, is a simple explanation of the felt importance of 
the moral conflict. Thus the belief in a good God is an 
intellectualisation of the experience of the moral 
conflict. 

This is given the form of a demonstrative argument 
in the famous moral argument for the existence of God. 
This is essentially a deduction from the stated fact that 
the demands of morality are something as real and 
objective as the external world. This reality can only 
be accounted for by assuming the existence of God. As 


THE MORAL ELEMENT 47 

before, we will not feel ourselves concerned with the 
question of the force of this argument; but note that 
the very wide appeal it has made is an indication that 
we have here, in the objectification of the moral con¬ 
flict, one of the sources of the belief in God. 

But there are other people who, when they are 
examined about their religion, show a totally different 
reaction to the moral conflict. They feel that unless 
they believed in God, they could not be good. With¬ 
out that belief, they would be unable to find any 
motive strong enough for moral conduct. Their belief 
is not the intellectualisation of an experience, but a 
belief dictated by a practical need. This is a psycho¬ 
logical process similar to what the psychoanalysts call a 
wish-fulfilment. If there is a strong practical necessity 
for a belief to be true, the mind tends to accept that 
belief. In practice, of course, it is not generally 
founded on a practical necessity alone. A belief origi¬ 
nated in other ways has its acceptance by the mind 
facilitated by the fact that it fulfils a practical need. 

This tendency too has been given intellectual ex¬ 
pression. An argument from human need to reality is 
not indeed common in the philosophy of religion, 
because it is not generally felt by philosophers to have 
much compelling force; but it is found very commonly 
in the looser thinking of popular religious writing. It 
is not unusual to find in such writing the argument 
used against atheism that it would lead to immorality, 
without any further discussion of the problem of 
whether it is not possible that a doctrine may be true 
even though it does lead to immorality. 

We may now pass to the discussion of the charac¬ 
teristic features of the contribution which this element 
makes to religious belief. In the first place, like the 





48 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

naturalistic element, its contribution is necessarily 
dualistic. As before, this dualism may be modified by 
other experiences or by the demands of rational think¬ 
ing: "'But it is a necessary character of moral experience 
that we find in the moral conflict two sides, the good 
and the evil. /The distinctive contribution which it 
makes to the conception of God is that it tends to con¬ 
ceive God as the supreme lawgiver. In forms of relig¬ 
ious belief in which this element is exaggerated, the 
conception of God will be found to be unduly legalistic. 

When we come to examine those forms of religion in 
which this element has attained a position of high 
importance, we find ourselves face to face with a much 
more interesting problem than those which confronted 
us in our discussion of other roots of belief. In the 
other cases such exaggerations were seen to be of rela¬ 
tive unimportance at the present time amongst edu¬ 
cated persons. In the case of the moral element, this is 
not so. A very large number of people at the present 
time consider that the task of dealing with the moral 
conflict is the sole legitimate one for religion, and all 
that there is actually in the higher religions apart from 
the moral element is an accretion which it is the task 
of an enlightened criticism of religion to purge away. 
Very often this is stated definitely by modern writers 
on religion. Often too it is implicit in their whole 
treatment of the subject although it is not definitely 
stated. Thus William James in his Varieties of Relig¬ 
ious Experience makes an examination of traditional 
sainthood in which he tries to be sympathetic to it, but 
finds on the whole that it represents an ideal which is 
really unintelligible to the modern mind. It is not 
difficult in reading James’s work, to see what is wrong. 
He has found himself absolutely unable to enter into a 


THE MORAL ELEMENT 


49 


conception of religion in which the ideal is not a moral 
one at all. Amongst American psychologists, Coe more 
definitely attaches a high importance to the moral ele¬ 
ment in religion; and it seems clear from his preface 
that this is because this element did, as a fact, pre¬ 
dominate in his own religion. 

Historically, there has always been a tendency for 
the separation out of the Christian religion of com¬ 
munities in which the moral root predominated. This 
tendency is found in puritanism and pietism in the 
Protestant tradition, and in Jansenism in the Catholic. 
There has been in it a very variable tendency amongst 
them to distrust religious feeling, and a constant one to 
distrust the naturalistic element. This distrust is prob¬ 
ably responsible for the harshness of Puritanism (using 
this word generically to cover Jansenism, etc.) towards 
the natural affections. 1" Since in this type of religion, 
God becomes the supfeme lawgiver rather than the 
lover of souls, it is not surprising that it has tended to 
produce a religion which is curiously hard and un¬ 
lovely. /It seems almost incredible to our milder relig¬ 
ious sentiment at the present day, that under the 
influence of this tradition only a short time ago little 
children were frightened by threats of hell-fire for 
childish faults, and that it was not thought a dishonour 
to God that he was first presented to their minds as a 
supreme bogey-man. 

There is certainly room for difference of opinion 
about what ought to be the nature of religion, and as 
psychologists we have no more right than anybody else 
to dogmatise about that question. But it is necessary 
to insist that it leads to a totally wrong method in the 
treatment of our subject to assume that that is what 
religion is; to try to read into historical religion the 


50 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

moral element alone and to ignore all th^at it owes to 
other elements as secondary accretions.! It is not true, 
for example, that historically Christianity has looked 
upon the love of God as a means of furthering morality. 
On the contrary, the tendency has been rather to look 
upon it as an end in itself, and to value morality 
mainly as a means of securing that end. The aim of 
religion, according to St Thomas Aquinas, is the attain¬ 
ment of the Beatific Vision; it is an experience, not a 
moral ideal. Moreover, a complaint may be made 
against the assumption without argument that moral¬ 
ity ought to be the sole concern of religioffTJ We may 
doubt this whether we are unbelievers or tlelievers in 
the claim of religion to truth. Even from a purely 
this-world point of view, religious belief may have a 
higher value in the satisfaction of emotional needs 
which are otherwise unsatisfied; its contribution to 
happiness may be as important as its contribution to 
morality. Possibly the increase of mental trouble at 
the present time amongst educated persons may be due 
in part to the decay of religious faith. On the other 
hand, if there is objective truth in religious belief, there 
seems to be no ground at all for attaching this ex¬ 
clusive importance to morality. The affective relation 
to God must be at least as important as right conduct. 

We cannot leave this subject without discussing a 
practical problem which the history of so^ne phases of 
religious though'rhas made important.] This is the 
problem of the value of concern about sin. That some 
measure of concern about sin is of high moral value 
will, of course, be disputed by no one. It is necessary, 
however, to point out that an exaggerated horror of sin 
may not only be undesirable as tending to produce a 
generally unhealthy and morbid attitude of mind; it 


THE MORAL ELEMENT 


51 


may also defeat its own ends by failing as an incen¬ 
tive to goodness. "^ 

This sounds paradoxical^ It may be objected that 
if "hatred of sin is the emotional driving force behind 
moral conduct, then the stronger the emotion, the 
stronger will be its effect. This, however, is not always 
true. There are occasions when a strong emotional 
reaction against a particular course of action makes 
it more difficult to avoid that course of action; and 
increased voluntary effort is not merely useless but 
tends even to intensify the difficulty. These cases 
come under what has been called by the new Nancy 
psychiatric school The Law of Reversed Effort.Wl 
propose to discuss this law in a later chapter; at pres¬ 
ent we may be content with a simple illustration which 
will convince us of its existence! Suppose that you 
have been told to walk along a plamriying on the floor 
of the room in which you are at present sitting, with¬ 
out stepping off on either side. You would have very 
little emotion about the possibility of your failure, and 
you would accomplish the task quite easily. Now 
suppose that you have been told that you must walk 
along something equally rigid and of the same width 
at a height of several hundreds of feet above the 
ground. You will almost certainly fall off. What 
has happened is that your horror of falling off has 
made the spontaneous autosuggestion of the fall so 
strong that you have not been able to prevent your 
mind from realising it. You will also find, under these 
conditions, that the harder you try to prevent your¬ 
self from falling off, the more certainly you will do so. 
Your only chance of performing the task successfully 
is to adopt a method which reduces to a minimum 
both your fear of a fall and your voluntary effort to 


52 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


keep on the plank; in other words, you must think 
neither about the height nor about the effort neces¬ 
sary to keep on the plank, but only about getting to 
the other end. 

The attraction of certain kinds of sin is also of the 
nature of a spontaneous autosuggestion. The Law of 
Reversed Effort does not, of course, mean that mere 
relaxation of effort is a method of escaping from the 
power of sin. What is meant is that the strength 
of the autosuggestion is increased by increased horror 
of the sin, and that the kind of effort which consists of 
a direct assault on the sin itself is not an effective way 
of overcoming the autosuggestion. ^ Other kinds of 
effort (as, for example, the effort towards virtue, or 
the effort to practise the reflective autosuggestion of 
the new Nancy school, which will be discussed in a 
later chapter) may be found to be successful. 

The psychological mechanism which is here at work 
is no new discovery of the twentieth century, and the 
following is a very early example of its recognition 
as a factor which must be reckoned with in the moral 
life. In the records of the Egyptian Fathers, the story 
is told of how one Father consulted the blessed man 
Pachomius about his temptations, which were of such 
violence that he felt disposed to give up the life of the 
desert and to return to the world. Pachomius replied 
that this temptation had fallen upon the other by his 
strenuousness, and described how he himself had spent 
long years in struggling against similar temptations, 
until a conviction that the temptations were sent to 
him to deliver him from excessive self-confidence made 
him cease to have anxious care about them. He then 
continued in peace from this struggle to the end of 
his days; this particular devil seeing that he had ceased 



THE MORAL ELEMENT 53 

to meditate about the matter never again approached 
him . 1 

If we wish to study an example of a person in whom 
the conviction of sin became so strong as to cease to 
have moral usefulness and to become little more than 
a mental disease, we may find one in that sad account 
of years of morbid preoccupation with his sins which 
Bunyan gives in Grace Abounding. From his child¬ 
hood, he says that he had few equals for cursing, swear¬ 
ing, lying and blaspheming. But even at these tender 
years he was frightened by fearful dreams and visions, 
and by apprehensions of Devils, and thoughts of the 
Day of Judgment and the torments of hell-fire. Soon 
after his marriage he began to go to church, but was 
still not sensible of the danger and evil of sin. But 
after a sermon on the evil of Sabbath breaking, he 
heard a voice while he was playing tip-cat on a Sun¬ 
day which said “Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to 
Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell?” But the 
thought of the grievousness of his many sins made his 
heart sink in despair, for he was convinced that it was 
too late for him to hope for forgiveness. So he made up 
his mind to fill his belly with the delicates of sin, and 
went on in sin with great greediness of mind, still 
grudging that he could not be so satisfied with it as 
he would. But after about a month a rebuke for the 
violence of his cursing and swearing from an ungodly 
woman made him ashamed, and he gave up the habit. 
Later, under the influence of a poor man who made 
profession of religion, he reformed his words and life, 
and his obvious reform made his neighbours take him 
for a very godly man, although he says that he knew 

1 The Paradise of the Fathers, translation by Wallis Budge, i. 130 
and 131. 


54 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


neither Christ, nor Grace, nor Faith, nor Hope. Now 
he had great peace in his conscience and thought God 
must be pleased with him. 

This condition lasted until he heard some poor 
women at Bedford talking about religion. These spoke 
of a new birth, and of the filthiness and insufficiency 
of their own righteousness. At this Bunyan’s heart 
began to shake, for he knew nothing of the new birth, 
and had not taken any notice of the temptations in 
thought about which the women were concerned. He 
began to be doubtful wdiether or not he had jaith, and 
his soul became assaulted by doubts about his future 
happiness, especially whether he w T as elected, or 
whether the Day of Grace was already past. He alter¬ 
nated between such depressions when he was ready to 
sink where he went with faintness in his mind, and 
similar periods of elation when he was obsessed with 
comforting words from Scripture. For years, however, 
the depressed condition predominated, although his 
conscience was so tender that he durst not take a pin 
or stick though but so big as a straw. Troubled, and 
tossed, and afflicted with the sight and sense and terror 
of his own wickedness, he was also afraid that this 
trouble might pass away from him and that he might 
lose his sense of guilt without remission of his sins. 
After a period of unusual peace, he became obsessed 
with the thought “Sell Christ, for this, sell him for 
that.” He resisted for a long time, saying: “I will 
not, I will not; no, not for thousands of worlds”; until 
suddenly he felt the thought pass through his mind, 
“Let him go, if he will.” Now he was convinced that 
he had committed the unforgivable sin, and a godly 
man to whom he confessed the matter agreed that he 
probably had. For two years nothing could occupy 
his mind but damnation and the expectation of damna- 


THE MORAL ELEMENT 55 

tion. Later, occasional periods of peace came when 
comforting texts remained with him for a time. These 
became longer until a study of Scripture convinced 
him that his was not the sin against the Holy Ghost, 
and that salvation came by the righteousness of Christ. 
After this time, comfort and peace were his usual state, 
and the periods of depression were only occasional. 

Professor Pratt 1 considers that Bunyan’s struggle 
was altogether without moral significance. Even ad¬ 
miration for Bunyan’s later heroic struggle against 
persecution cannot blind us to the fact that this judg¬ 
ment is correct. His moral reform came before and 
was independent of this mental conflict; nor does the 
latter seem to have been connected with any enrich¬ 
ment of his devotional life. The struggle was not 
against any real moral evil. Such evil as Bunyan was 
struggling against—the obsession by anti-religious 
thoughts—seems clearly to have been intensified by the 
struggle. We must remember also that it is only be¬ 
cause Bunyan succeeded in emerging from this un¬ 
healthy condition of mental pain and of morbid pre¬ 
occupation about his own damnation, and became a 
great religious personality, that we have any record 
of the obsessions at all. How many weak souls were 
driven by the threats of hell-fire and thunders against 
the filthiness of human righteousness, to despair and 
madness or vice, we do not know. 

We may now turn to an example of the other ex¬ 
treme, and look at the life of a religious person in 
whom the moral element seems to have been entirely 
undeveloped. The life I will take is the well-known 
one of Benvenuto Cellini. Cellini was an intensely 
devout person; he lived in an atmosphere of exalted 
religious emotion. Yet his life was one of profligacy 

1 The Religious Consciousness (New York, 1920), 


56 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


and murder, lived without any consciousness of incon¬ 
sistency. His religion meant nothing to his morality. 
He could murder his enemy in cold blood just as he 
was leaving Mass filled with beautiful religious emo¬ 
tions. In prison, he was sustained with an uplifting 
sense of the divine‘favour, and records that for ever 
afterwards he had an aureole of glory on his head. 

A practical problem which confronts religion is the 
necessity for striking a compromise between these two 
extremes. Clearly, if the sense of sin is absent, im¬ 
morality must be expected; but, on the other hand, it is 
not a satisfactory solution of the problem so to in¬ 
tensify the sense of guilt that it becomes morbid. Re¬ 
ligion wants to prevent its followers from becoming 
Cellinis, without making them into Bunyans. This 
problem is to some extent solved by the Catholic prac¬ 
tice of auricular confession (which exists also in some 
form or other in very many Protestant bodies). Simply 
on the psychological level, the value of confession 
appears to lie in the fact that it maintains a predomi¬ 
nantly healthy-minded attitude towards sin, as well as 
providing a disciplinary remedy against it. It may, of 
course, be disputed how far it is successful in this, but it 
certainly succeeds in some measure, and its effective re¬ 
placement is a real problem in applied psychology for 
those forms of religion which have dispensed with it. 

This view of the psychological value of confession is 
confirmed by Professor Raymond and M. P. Janet who 
say: 

Regular Confession might have been instituted by 
some mental specialists of genius as the best means of 
treating the victims of obsession. Where is the man 
or woman who does not pass through periods of de¬ 
pression and bitterness? Between the extremes of 


THE MORAL ELEMENT 57 

morbid obsession and that state of anxiousness which 
is fully justified by many of the circumstances of life 
there are a good many intermediary stages. Confession 
acts upon all these states of despondency like a heal¬ 
ing balm to pacify troubles and quicken dying hopes. 
The abandonment of Confession may easily lead to a 
condition of anxious unrest . 1 

I do not, of course, wish to pretend to settle the 
dispute between the defenders and the critics of the 
practical value of confession. It is my purpose only to 
point out the kind of problem in applied psychology 
which is involved. The mere opening of moral conflicts 
to another person is often sufficient to prevent them 
from becoming the source of morbid obsessions like 
those of Bunyan. We may notice here an interesting 
observation which illustrates this fact. Amongst 
melancholic asylum patients the obsession that they 
have committed the unpardonable sin and are there¬ 
fore for ever cut off from the hope of God’s forgiveness 
is very common. Yet the authors of the Dictionary of 
Psychological Medicine state that they have only met 
with one patient suffering from this obsession who was 
a Catholic; all the others were Protestants. There is 
little doubt that these facts are important, but it is im¬ 
possible to make a fair inference from them unless we 
take into account also those cases of persons to whom 
confession must have been habitual who nevertheless 
suffered from scruples which remind us of the obses¬ 
sions of Bunyan. Such a case, for example, was St Al¬ 
phonse Liguori. It is to be hoped that further impartial 
observations may throw additional light on this ques¬ 
tion. 

1 Les Obsessions et les Neurastheni&s, p. 707. Paris; quoted in 
Spiritual Director and Physician, by V. Raymond, 0. P. English 
translation, p. 35. 


CHAPTER V 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT IN 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

The next kind of experience which we must discuss as 
a root of belief in God is that made up of the moods, 
emotions and feeling states which we have called the 
affective root (or feeling root ) of religious belief. The 
name mystical has also sometimes been applied to it. I 
have rejected that name because I prefer to follow the 
more usual custom of limiting the word mystical to ex¬ 
periences which are definitely abnormal in the sense 
that they do not occur to the ordinary religious person. 
Everyone has a certain number of emotional experi¬ 
ences in connection with his religion. To most religious 
people there are times at which these experiences are 
intense and are yet obviously not different in kind from 
the less intense experiences of their ordinary religious 
lives. At the same time, there are a few persons to 
whom subjective religious experiences occur with un¬ 
usual strength and constancy, and who have experi¬ 
ences which are remarkably similar amongst them¬ 
selves but different from those of ordinary people. 
These are the mystics, who must be treated in more 
detail in a later chapter. 

For the purpose of description we may make a pre¬ 
liminary distinction between those experiences which 
seem to occur apart from religious belief and tend to 
result in it, and those which accompany religious prac- 

58 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 59 

tices and may confirm and enrich previously held 
beliefs. 

Some of the emotional experiences connected with the 
beauty of nature which were described in the last chap¬ 
ter might equally well have been considered here as 
examples of religious experience of the first kind (those 
which tend to result in religious belief), for example, 
Thoreau’s feeling of a prevailing friendliness in the 
sights and sounds around his lonely dwelling. Many 
examples of this kind of experience are to be found in 
the chapter on “The Reality of the Unseen” in William 
James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. I will quote 
one of them, an account written by a man aged twenty- 
seven. 

I have on a number of occasions felt that I had en¬ 
joyed a period of intimate communion with the divine. 
These meetings came unasked and unexpected, and 
seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration 
of the conventionalities which usually surround and 
cover my life. . . . Once it was when from the summit 
of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corru¬ 
gated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean 
that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same 
point when I could see nothing beneath me but a 
boundless expanse of white cloud, on the blown surface 
of which a few high peaks, including the one I was 
on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging 
at their anchors. What I felt on these occasions was 
a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by 
an illumination which revealed to me a deeper signifi¬ 
cance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in 
this that I find my justification for saying that I have 
enjoyed communication with God. Of course, the 
absence of such a being as this would be chaos. I can¬ 
not conceive of life without its presence. 


60 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

We may notice the characters of the experience as 
they are here described: the sense of an intimate per¬ 
vading presence, the sense of a deepened significance in 
life and the sense of a loss of identity. These are marks 
of such an experience which, we shall find, tend to 
, recur. 

The first two of these feelings need no particular 
elucidation. They have probably in some measure 
fallen within the experience of all of us. But we may 
feel inclined to ask what such writers mean when they 
speak of a feeling of the loss of their identity. It will be 
noticed that a future account will describe apparently 
the opposite experience—‘an intense quickening of the 
sense of personality.’ Now the sense of identity or self- 
consciousness is a result of the fact that our experi¬ 
encing and enjoying are accompanied by the idea of the 
self which is experiencing and enjoying. It is usual in 
psychological text-books to say that the experience of 
animals is not so accompanied. If that is the case, they 
have no sense of their own identities, and the words I 
and me have no meaning for them. It is clear, moreover, 
that the extent to which in human beings an experience 
is consciously accompanied by the idea of the experi¬ 
encing self is very variable. An absorbed spectator at a 
football match, an artist engrossed in the contemplation 
or the execution of a work of art, or a nature-lover lost 
in the beauty of a sunset, all tend to lose, at least in 
part, even the vaguest consciousness of themselves. The 
intense absorption in any experience of things outside 
is accompanied by a partial loss of the sense of identity 
which is apparent to introspection when the period of 
intense absorption is over. Possibly the sense of lost 
identity described in these forms of religious experience 
means simply that the experience makes an even greater 



THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 


61 


appeal of the same kind to spontaneous attention than 
the football match to the lover of football and the work 
of art to the artist. If this explanation be the true one, 
it is not surprising to find that in the experience of 
Prince Muishkin, which we shall describe later, where a 
deepening of the sense of personality is spoken of, this 
follows a state of absent-mindedness in which attention 
had become detached from the experience of the ex¬ 
ternal world. 

Experiences of the kind we are describing are not al¬ 
ways, of course, intellectualised by a belief in God. The 
theistic interpretation may be rejected by the mind for 
other reasons; because of other experiences which clash 
with it, or on intellectual grounds. Swinburne, for 
example, seems to be describing such an experience in 
the poem already quoted. He has a sense of a pervading 
presence—“The whole wood feels thee, the whole air 
fears thee”; he feels a loss of his own identity—“naught 
is all, as am I but a dream of thee.” Other experiences, 
however, lead him to reject the belief in God. 

An odd case of similar experience is found in what is 
called the anaesthetic revelation about which a good 
deal has been written by Mr Blood. This is a conviction 
felt often under an anaesthetic that one has grasped the 
secret of the universe. J. A. Symonds says of such an 
experience: 

Only think of it. To have felt for that long dateless 
ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and ten¬ 
derness and truth and absolute love, and then to find 
that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had 
been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. 

Blood makes this revelation the moral sustenance of 
his life. He says: 


62 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

I know—as having known—the meaning of Existence: 
the sane centre of the universe—at once the wonder 
and the assurance of the soul—for which the speech 
of reason has as yet no name but the Anaesthetic reve¬ 
lation . 1 

But (and this is a point which is not mentioned by 
the writers on the anaesthetic revelation) the secret of 
the universe revealed in this way may be a terrible one. 
This seems to be particularly liable to be the case when 
the anaesthesia is light and the operation painful. A 
mental specialist has told me that he has often had an 
experience of a terrible secret of the universe in this 
way, and that once after he had undergone an operation 
under anaesthetic he found that the experience recurred 
to him later. To him the world appeared not as founded 
on a transcendent reality, but as something horribly, 
inexpressibly unreal. 

A case has been brought to my notice in which an 
experience similar to the anaesthetic revelation seems 
to have been passed through in the delirium of a death¬ 
bed. The subject was a metaphysician and a priest. 
The period before his death is thus described: 

I was with him shortly before his death. He was 
then alternately clear and wandering. In his wander¬ 
ing he tried again and again to make clear to me 
something that he had learned about the attributes of 
God, especially about the Eternity of God. “The Ever¬ 
lasting Now”—this he repeated several times and then 
tried to explain it but tried in vain to find the words 
he wanted. He looked distressed at this, and also 
looked at me with distress because I could not follow 
him. These wanderings lasted but a short time, and 
then a change would come over his eyes and he would 

1 Quoted from The Varieties of Religious Experience. 



THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 63 

ask me if he had said anything he ought not to have 
said, and for awhile was completely self-possessed, re¬ 
sponding to what I said, or joining in the prayers, but 
never referring to the subjects which occupied him in 
his delirium. Then he would lapse again into inco¬ 
herent words about the Eternity of God. 

It is not possible to discuss all the moods of exaltation 
accompanying abnormal bodily or mental conditions 
which have made occasional contributions to religion. 
There are, however, two which I wish to mention quite 
shortly. These are the states of mind which result from 
the taking of hashish, and the exalted emotions which 
apparently sometimes occur immediately before an 
epileptic attack. 

Hashish has been used in the East as a means of 
securing such moods. Its effects have often been de¬ 
scribed by users of the drug. It is said to produce a 
succession of intense visions, often of great beauty. 
These are followed by a period in which the things of 
the outside world are perceived but with an enormously 
exaggerated sense of space and time. Every second 
seems to be hours long, and near objects seem to be 
great distances away. This extension of space gives an 
impression of vastness in ordinary objects; small rooms 
seem to have the dimensions of banqueting halls. This 
sense of being surrounded by huge spaces seems to add 
to the mental exaltation which accompanies the taking 
of this drug. 

As an example of an exalted state of mind before an 
epileptic fit, I am taking the account given by Dostoieff- 
sky in The Idiot. You will remember that Dostoievsky 
was himself an epileptic, so it is to be supposed that he 
is describing the attack from personal experience. Such 
emotional accompaniments of epilepsy do not, however, 


64 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

appear to be common. Speaking of the epileptic Prince 
Muishkin, he says: 

He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or 
rather immediately preceding them, he had always ex¬ 
perienced a moment or two when his whole heart, and 
mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour and light; 
when he became filled with joy and hope, and all his 
anxieties seemed to be swept away for ever; these 
moments were but presentiments, as it were, of the 
one final second (it was never more than a second) 
in which the fit came upon him. That second, of 
course, was inexpressible. When his attack was over, 
and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to 
say to himself: “These moments, short as they are, 
when I feel such extreme consciousness of myself, and 
consequently more of life than at other times, are due 
only to the disease—to the sudden rupture of normal 
conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher 
kind of life, but a lower.” This reasoning, however, 
seemed to end in a paradox, and lead to the further 
consideration: “What matter though it be only a dis¬ 
ease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I 
recall and analyze the moment, it seems to have been 
one of harmony and beauty in the highest degree—an 
instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with un¬ 
bounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and com- 
pletest life?” . . . These instants were characterized 
—to define it in a word—by an intense quickening of 
the sense of personality. Since in the last conscious 
moment preceding the attack, he could say to himself, 
with full understanding of his words: “I would give 
my whole life for this one instant,” then doubtless to 
him it really was worth a lifetime. For the rest, he 
thought the dialectical part of his argument of little 
worth; he saw only too clearly that the result of these 
ecstatic moments was stupefaction, mental darkness, 



THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 65 

idiocy. No argument was possible on that point. His 
conclusion, his estimate of the “moment,” doubtless 
contained some error, yet the reality of the sensation 
troubled him. What more unanswerable than a fact? 
And this fact had occurred. The prince had confessed 
unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense 
beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment 
worth a lifetime. 

He adds that it was no doubt to such a moment that 
the epileptic Mahomet refers when he says that he 
visited all the dwellings of Allah, in less time than was 
needed to empty a pitcher of water. 

Such experiences as these, however, have been used 
but rarely in the service of religion. They must always 
awaken the doubt whether they are not mere tricks of 
the imagination which owe their origin and have their 
full explanation in a diseased state of the brain, or 
whether (as may quite consistently be maintained by 
those who accept their authority) a disordered condi¬ 
tion of the mind is a possible condition for a real insight 
into the highest reality. A set of experiences which 
belong more properly to the religious life in its early 
stages are the emotional states which lead up to adoles¬ 
cent conversion. Adolescent conversion will be treated 
in greater detail in a later chapter, so these emotional 
states will be mentioned now quite shortly. 

Starbuck made elaborate statistical investigations 
into these facts and describes the stages preceding con¬ 
version as: a sense of incompleteness and imperfection; 
brooding, depression, introspection and a sense of sin; 
anxiety about the future life and distress over doubts. 
These are followed after conversion by a happy relief, a 
sense of pardon and of certainty. These mental states 
have been schematised to an extraordinary extent by 


66 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

him in his Psychology of Religion. There is no doubt 
that a great part of his account of the adolescent conver¬ 
sion is valuable, but he has failed to recognise how much 
of what he describes is merely the result of suggestion, 
and how much of the uniformity of his results is due to 
the fact that his material is almost entirely taken from a 
particular type of American Protestantism, which had 
these conventional expectations about conversion. His 
neglect of this matter makes him take his classifications 
much more seriously than they deserve, and makes it 
necessary to read his book with a good deal of caution. 
My purpose in alluding here to adolescent conversion is 
principally in order to draw attention to those emo¬ 
tional experiences preceding religion which contain the 
element of incompleteness. 

There are three kinds of religious experience which 
resemble one another in being of the nature of a relief 
from a painful mental state. These are: the sense of the 
forgiveness of sins, the sense of felt certainty in belief, 
and the sense of permanence and stability in the divine. 
These are related to three painful mental states. The 
sense of sin, with its accompaniment of what Professor 
McDougall calls negative self-feeling, is a mental state 
with a strongly painful feeling-tone. In the last chapter, 
we saw an example in which this painful state attained 
terrible intensity in the mind of Bunyan. When this 
state is removed by the conviction of forgiveness re¬ 
ceived in answer to prayer, in a conversion experience, 
or when absolution is received from a priest, its relief 
is the mental experience called the forgiveness of sins. 
Intellectual uncertainty is also a painful mental state. 
This will be seen later to be a fact of importance in the 
study of conversion. The pleasure accompanying the 
change from doubt to a conviction of certainty may be 


67 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 

very strong. In a vivid account of his conversion experi¬ 
ences written on parchment and worn over his heart, 
Pascal has the following line: “Certitude, joie, certi¬ 
tude, sentiment, vue, joie,” and a similar mention of the 
joy of certainty is frequently found in other writings of 
the same kind. Last, there is the sense of divine sta¬ 
bility. The painful emotional state of which this is a 
relief is the sadness produced by the impermanence and 
transitoriness of all that we value on earth, of human 
life and of human affection. Relief to this is given by 
the thought of the permanence and reality found in the 
idea of God. 

In each of these mental attitudes, a pleasurable affect 
is produced, because a mental need is supplied, the lack 
of which had previously been painful to the mind. 

The affective state called the sense of the presence of 
God does not differ from the sense of a presence de¬ 
scribed earlier in this chapter as a constituent of the 
vague emotional experiences which come before relig¬ 
ious belief, except in the fact that it is more specifically 
provided with an object. The following account from 
The Varieties of Religious Experience is a typical one: 

I have the sense of a presence, strong and at the 
same time soothing, which hovers over me. Sometimes 
it seems to enwrap me with sustaining arms . 1 

The characteristic experience of mystical prayer 
which is generally called contemplation is also a sense of 
God’s presence. It differs from these non-mystical ex¬ 
periences of the same kind, however, in several respects. 
The most important of these are: the fact that what is 
felt is more than mere presence, it is something more 


1 Op. tit. p. 72. 


68 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


like possession; it is much less under voluntary control; 
and it involves suspension of the power to perform cer¬ 
tain kinds of mental activity. The characters of con¬ 
templation will be discussed in more detail in a later 
chapter devoted to mysticism. 

I will give two examples of contemplation; one from 
a Catholic, the other from a Protestant mystic. St 
Teresa says: 

In the prayer of union the soul is asleep, fast asleep, 
as regards the world and itself: in fact, during the 
short time that this state lasts it is deprived of all 
feeling whatever, being unable to think on any sub¬ 
ject, even if it wished. No effort is needed here to 
suspend the thoughts, if the soul can love—it knows 
not how, nor whom it loves, nor what it desires. In 
fact, it has died entirely to this world, to live more 
truly than ever in God . 1 

The second is from an account of his life given by 
Evan Roberts, the Welsh revivalist: 

One Friday night last spring, when praying by my 
bedside before retiring, I was taken up into a great 
expanse without time or space—it was communion 
with God. Before this it was a far-off God that I had. 
I was frightened that night but never since. . . . After 
that I was awakened every night a little after one. 

. . . From that time I was taken up into Divine fel¬ 
lowship for about four hours . 2 

The practices of religion have also their accompani¬ 
ment of emotional experience without which they would 
become extraordinarily empty of meaning. The com- 

1 The Interior Castle, by St Teresa (English translation by the 
Benedictines of Stanbrook, London, 1906), 5. i. 3. 

1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, xix. p. 80. 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 69 

ment of a member of the Church of England attending a 
ceremony in the Greek Church, or of a Greek who has 
found his way into an Indian temple, will probably be 
the same: “This is mere meaningless ceremonial.” The 
reason for this judgment is that in each case the ob¬ 
server is witnessing the practices of religion without 
himself feeling the emotional accompaniment which 
gives them significance to the worshippers. To the wor¬ 
shippers themselves they are never merely meaningless 
ceremonial, they are rich in affective significance. In 
prayer, a sense of the presence of, and of communication 
with God is felt, which is effective in removing distress 
and increasing happiness. While the litany of saints is 
repeated, the worshipper feels himself surrounded by 
the multitudes he is invoking. In the presence of the 
consecrated sacrament, the believing Catholic has a 
sense of the presence of God stronger than any he 
experiences at other times. 

Some parts of the religious cult seem to have as one of 
their ends the intensification of emotional experiences. 
The pomp of the ritual intensifies the emotions of awe 
which are felt by the worshippers. Posture in prayer 
has its effects on the emotions. The position of kneeling 
is not merely an outward symbol of submission; it 
actually tends to produce the emotional attitude of 
submission in the mind of a person to whom it is such 
a symbol. Sacred music plainly has as its principal 
object the control of the worshippers’ emotions. One of 
the objects of meditation is to facilitate the emotional 
response to the objects meditated upon. What are 
called acts of faith, love, etc., are simple autosugges¬ 
tions which are intended to strengthen the feelings of 
certainty in the religious belief and of affection towards 
the object of religious worship respectively. 


70 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


The affective experiences of religion have attached to 
them the same danger as similar experiences of secular 
life—the danger that they may be pursued as ends in 
themselves, and lose their value as stimuli to action. 
This is what is called sentimentalism. We may remind 
ourselves of the example given by William James of the 
Russian lady who was weeping over the troubles of 
fictitious people on the stage while her coachman was 
freezing to death on the pavement outside, the emotion 
of sorrow having become to her enjoyable merely as a 
mental state and no longer impelling her to the action 
of relieving distress. In just the same way there is a 
tendency for a strongly affective religion to degenerate 
into religious sentimentalism. Its exalted emotions 
cease to be spurs to heroic conduct for the love of God. 
On the contrary, the soul basks in its pleasurable emo¬ 
tions like a cat in the sun, as if the multiplication of 
emotions were the aim of its religion; with the result at 
best of moral weakness, and at worst of moral disaster. 
The mystics have been aware of the danger of senti¬ 
mentalism. “Lord, lead me not by the way of sensible 
consolations,” is their constant prayer. 

In illustration of this criticism of affective religion, I 
will quote a typical protest against religion of the affec¬ 
tive type from a person whose religion appears to be of 
a predominantly ethical character. It is from the speech 
of the counsel who defended Flaubert in the action 
brought against him in connection with Madame 
Bovary: 

Je ne connais rien de plus utile et de plus necessaire 
que le sentiment religieux grave, et permettez-moi 
cTajouter, severe. 

Je veux que mes enfants comprennent un Dieu, non 
pas un Dieu dans les abstractions du pantheisme, non, 



THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 71 

mais un etre supreme avec lequel ils sont en rapport, 
vers lequel ils s’elevent pour le prier, et qui en meme 
temps les grandit et les fortifie. Cette pensee-la, . . . 
c’est la force dans les mauvais jours, . . . le refuge, ou 
mieux encore, la force des faibles. . . . Mais voici 
ou commence l’alteration. Pour accommoder la re¬ 
ligion a toutes les natures, on fait intervenir toutes 
sortes de petites choses, chetives, miserables, mes- 
quines. . . . Elies [the young girls about whom he is 
speaking] se font alors de petites religions de pratique, 
de petites devotions de tendresse, d’amour, et au lieu 
d’avoir dans leur ame le sentiment de Dieu, le senti¬ 
ment du devoir, elles s’abandonnent a des revasseries, 
a de petites pratiques, a de petites devotions. Et puis 
vient la poesie, et puis viennent, il faut bien le dire, 
mille pensees de charite, de tendresse, d’amour mys¬ 
tique, mille formes qui trompent les jeunes filles, qui 
sensualisent la religion. Ces pauvres enfants naturelle- 
ment credules et faibles se prennent a tout cela, a la 
poesie, a la revasserie, au lieu de s’attacher a quelque 
chose de raisonnable et de severe. D’ou il arrive que 
vous avez beaucoup de femmes fort devotes, qui ne 
sont pas religieuses du tout. Et quand le vent les 
pousse hors du chemin ou elles devrait marcher, au 
lieu de trouver la force, elles ne trouvent que toute 
espece de sensualites qui les egarent. 

Of course, the speaker, a barrister, is very much over¬ 
stating the case against affective religion. But what he 
is describing are real dangers. The tendency to follow 
emotion for its own sake and not as an incentive to 
religious action, threatens the morality of those who 
succumb to it. 

The first danger, then, threatening a religion in which 
the affective element has attained an exaggerated im¬ 
portance is that of sentimentalism, with its resultant 


72 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

moral weakness. There is secondly a tendency to in¬ 
tellectual weakness. Exaggeratedly affective religion is, 
of course, often a result of despair of the intellect as a 
guide to truth. Goethe, speaking through Faust, finds 
at the same time the impossibility of a satisfactory 
affirmation of the being of God in intellectual terms, and 
of a denial of Him in terms of feeling: 

Wer darf ihn nennen? Und wer bekennen: Ich glaub’ 
ihn? Wer empfinden, Und sich unterwinden Zu sagen: 
ich glaub’ ihn nicht? Der Allumfasser, Der Allerhal- 
ter, . . . Erfiiir davon dein Herz, so gross es ist, Und 
wenn du ganz in dem Gefiihle selig bist, Nenn’ es dann, 
wie du willst . 1 

The intellectualist can, of course, easily make such a 
position seem to be weaker than it really is. Expressed 
in intellectual terms, and attacked by intellectual 
methods, it seems to be indefensible indeed. But the 
real point of the position of reliance on feeling is that it 
denies the claim of intellect to have the deciding voice 
in matters of belief, and claims for feeling an authority 
of its own at least as ultimate as that of reason. At the 
same time, it is open to the serious objection that in 
rejecting the rational element in religious belief, religion 
of the affective type must necessarily be weak because 
it is deficient in one element which plays some part at 
least in the constitution of the beliefs of the normally 
constituted mind. 

To this type also belong those forms of religion which 

1 Faust, Pt I, Marthens Garten, “Who can name Him? Who 
thus proclaim Him: I believe Him? Who that hath feeling His 
bosom stealing, Can say I believe Him not? The All-embracing, 
The All-sustaining, . . . Great though it be, fill thou therefrom 
thine heart, And when in the feeling wholly blest thou art, Call it 
then what thou wilt!” (English translation by A. G. Latham, Lon¬ 
don, 1908). 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 73 

rest largely on intuition, on the subjective feeling of 
certainty—such as Quakerism. I will quote a typical 
affirmation of faith of this kind from a thesis called De 
VExperience Chretienne by Emile Paradon, quoted by 
Professor Leuba. He is discussing the question of 
whether the experiences of prayer are all illusion, due 
to autosuggestion: 

... it becomes evident to us . . . that the objections 
of our adversary cannot reach us. We stand on two 
different grounds, and so we doubt if he will ever un¬ 
derstand us, but he cannot shake in us the affirmations 
of experience; namely, that we feel within us a being 
that is not ourselves; we see born within us new ideas 
and perceptions, real revelations that do not come from 
ourselves. 

A religion thus based suffers in the same way from 
the disadvantages resulting from the rejection of the 
rational element. 

This seems to be the most suitable place to mention 
shortly the visions and locutions which are found in the 
religious life. These are largely but not entirely con¬ 
fined to those whom we have called mystics in the re¬ 
stricted sense, and amongst these to those who have 
reached the stage of ecstasy. They play a much less im¬ 
portant part in mystical thought than seems generally 
to be supposed. The tendency has been, on the whole, 
for the mystics themselves to attach slight value to 
visions and to regard them as methods of illumination 
too open to the danger of deception to be considered de¬ 
sirable. What has made them take such a prominent 
place in the recorded lives of the Catholic mystics has 
been the naive enthusiasm of their biographers for the 
marvellous. 


74 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

Traditionally these experiences have been divided 
into three classes. The first are exterior visions and 
locutions, in which the object seen or heard appears to 
the percipient to belong to the outside world. The sec¬ 
ond may be called imagined. 1 In these the percipient has 
a clear image of what he sees or hears, but does not 
suppose it to belong to the outside world. The third are 
intellectual visions and locutions. In these the object is 
stated to be neither seen nor heard, but there is an inner 
feeling of a presence or a communication. It is not 
generally easy to make out from a narrative whether a 
vision which is being described is an exterior or an 
imaginal one, unless (as rarely happens) the person to 
whom the experience has occurred is interested in 
drawing the distinction. The difference between them 
is probably perfectly clear in all cases to the percipient 
himself. It seems likely that most of the visions de¬ 
scribed which are not intellectual are of the imaginal 
kind, and that exterior visions are rare. St Teresa, for 
example, records that she never had an exterior vision 
or locution. 

A typical example of the distinction between the 
account given of an exterior and imaginal vision, is to be 
found in a recently published account of a modem 
mystic: 

In speaking to us of visions of Christ seen, and words 
heard, by him on subsequent occasions when in a 
state of Ecstasy, he clearly and emphatically distin¬ 
guished the vision at his conversion, when he saw 
Christ with his bodily eyes and heard him “with these 

a The usual name for this class has been imaginary. This, how¬ 
ever, is a misleading word, since in English it suggests an irrelevant 
judgment on their reality. I propose, therefore, to substitute the 
word imaginal, which is used in psychology as an adjective to 
describe mental facts belonging to the same class as images. 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 75 

ears/’ from the later visions when he saw and heard 
with “spiritual” sight and hearing. 1 

The following is a description of an intellectual vision 
given by St Teresa. She is speaking of herself: 

She was conscious of His [God] being at her right 
hand, although not in the way we know an ordinary 
person to be beside us, but in a more subtle manner 
which cannot be described. This Presence is, however, 
quite as evident and certain, and indeed far more so, 
than the ordinary presence of other people about which 
we may be deceived; not so in this, for it brings with 
it graces and spiritual effects which could not come 
from melancholia. 2 

The order in which the different classes of vision have 
been valued has been the opposite of the order in which 
I have described them. Intellectual visions have been 
considered to be highly trustworthy, imaginal visions 
less so, while exterior visions have been regarded with 
considerable suspicion. 

Some visions were supposed to be delusions of the evil 
one even when they took a religious form, and it was be¬ 
cause of this danger that exterior visions and imaginal 
ones were so distrusted. It was supposed that intel¬ 
lectual visions could not be counterfeited by the devil. 
In addition many of the ecstatics had horrible visions of 
the devil, and auditory hallucinations of the same kind, 
as well as suffering from physical assaults of the fiends. 
Diabolical action of such kind has received attention 
from French medical writers on this subject. 

It is natural to compare these visions and locutions of 
religion with similar phenomena of ordinary life. It 
seems probable that we are sometimes dealing with 

1 The Sadhu, by Streeter and Appasamy (London, 1921), p. 8. 
a The Interior Castle, by St Teresa, 6. vm. 4. 


76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

appearances which occur equally outside religion, but 
which have been given a religious colouring by the 
dominant religious interests of the person experiencing 
them, as well as with phenomena belonging more specif¬ 
ically to the religious life itself. Hallucinations are not 
very common amongst sane persons, but they are very 
common accompaniments of some forms of mental 
disease. Statistical investigation, however, suggests 
that at least one in every five sane persons experiences 
a fairly vivid hallucination at some time in his life. 
There are peculiar hallucinations found amongst sane 
persons, which are caused by the reflected pain of 
visceral disease. These have been investigated and 
described by Dr Head. 1 I have not been able to dis¬ 
cover any records of experiences in religion which 
obviously belong to this class, although some of the 
diabolical obsessions of the sense of smell may do so. 

The distinction between exterior and imaginal visions 
is obviously precisely the same as the distinction drawn 
in psychology between hallucinations and pseudo-hallu¬ 
cinations. Pseudo-hallucinations are those which the 
subject does not mistake for external objects, as he does 
genuine hallucinations. It is often assumed without 
argument in books on religious psychology that the 
persons who have visions are those with strong visual 
imagery, who mistook their images for reality. It has 
always seemed to me to be at least as probable that they 
are people ordinarily devoid of such imagery, who are 
particularly impressed by it because it comes only under 
these conditions. St Teresa clearly was not a visualiser, 
for she complains of the impossibility of picturing 
things to herself in meditation. On the other hand, I 

1 ‘‘Mental Changes that accompany Visceral Disease,” by Dr 
Henry Head. Brain, 1901. 


THE AFFECTIVE ELEMENT 77 

have found good visualisers amongst persons who have 
experienced religious visions. We must wait for more 
evidence before it is possible to decide this question. 

Another problem in connection with visions which 
needs experimental investigation by a sufficiently self- 
sacrificing experimental psychologist is the connection 
between fasting and hallucinatory appearances. It is 
generally asserted without any appeal to evidence that 
one of the objects of fasting is to produce religious 
visions. That may be the case, although its value as a 
means of self-discipline is probably very much more 
important. 

Sadhu Sundar Singh in his twenty-third year tried to 
carry out a forty days’ fast in imitation of Christ: 

During the early stages of the fast there was a feel¬ 
ing of intense burning in his stomach on account of 
lack of food but this soon passed away. In the course 
of the fast he saw Christ; not, he says, as at his con¬ 
version, with his physical eyes, because they were now 
dim and could not see anything, but in a spiritual 
vision, with pierced hands, bleeding feet and radiant 
face. Throughout the whole period he felt in himself 
a remarkable enrichment of that sense of peace and 
happiness which has been his in a measure ever since 
he became a Christian. Indeed so great was this sense 
that he had no temptation whatever to give up the 
fast. As his physical powers became enfeebled he saw, 
or thought he saw, a lion or other wild animal and 
heard it growl; the growl appeared to come from a 
distance, while the animal itself appeared to be near. 1 

He also records a permanent effect on his spiritual life 
and on his character. These are what he regards as the 
important results of his fast. 

1 The Sadhu, by Streeter and Appasamy, p. 25. 


CHAPTER VI 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT IN 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF 

Even if we are right in supposing that primitive re¬ 
ligious belief is not at first a product of reasoning 
processes but of vague feelings and illogical deductions, 
reflection in words appears early, even though its func¬ 
tion at first may be only to justify beliefs already held 
on other grounds. We seem to have the earliest begin¬ 
nings of reflective thought of this kind in the following 
account quoted by Ribot. An intelligent Basuto is the 
speaker: 

Twelve years ago, I went to feed my flocks. The 
weather was hazy. I sat down upon a rock and asked 
myself sorrowful questions; yes, sorrowful, because I 
was unable to answer them. Who has touched the 
stars with his hands? On what pillars do they rest? I 
asked myself. The waters are never weary; they know 
no other law than to flow without ceasing—from morn¬ 
ing till night, and from night till morning; but where 
do they stop? and who makes them flow thus? The 
clouds also come and go, and burst in water over the 
earth. Whence come they? Who sends them? The 
diviners certainly do not give us rain; for how could 
they do it? and why do I not see them with my own 
eyes, when they go up to heaven to fetch it? ... I 
cannot see the wind; but what is it? Who brings it, 
makes it blow? . . . Then I buried my face in both my 
hands. 1 

1 The Psychology of the Emotions, by Ribot (English transla¬ 
tion), p. 371 n., quoted from The Basutos by Casilos, p. 239. 

78 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 79 

In the discussion of the rational element in religious 
belief, I propose to start with a descriptive account of 
the reasoning processes which lead up to or confirm a 
belief in God (in other words, the arguments for the 
existence of God) without any attempt at a philo¬ 
sophical discussion of their validity. Such a discussion 
would be outside the scope of the psychology of religion. 
Even if it could be shown that any or all of these argu¬ 
ments were invalid, they would still remain of psycho¬ 
logical interest, for they have provided the foundation 
of the religious belief of men. 

There is first the purely a priori ‘ontological’ argu¬ 
ment of St Anselm, Descartes, and Leibnitz. This has 
been stated in several different ways. Descartes’ state¬ 
ment of it may be put quite shortly as follows. The idea 
of God is the idea of a perfect being. Existence is a 
perfection, non-existence an imperfection. Therefore, a 
perfect being has existence as one of his attributes. In 
other words, God exists. 

The others are arguments from experience. What is 
called the ‘cosmological’ argument infers God from the 
necessity to account for the beginning of the chain of 
causal sequence. Every event in the world has its cause 
in some previous event which was itself similarly 
caused. Once such a series of events has started, it may 
go on for ever, but there is no reason in itself why it 
should ever have started. A first cause must be assumed 
which is God. 

The teleological argument differs from the cosmo¬ 
logical in the fact that it makes its inference from the 
particular characters of things which seem to point to 
a personal creator. Of these characters three are de¬ 
scribed. Living things show in their structures evidences 
of order beyond what can be conferred by the operation 


80 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


of physical laws. Things seem to have a purpose to 
fulfil beyond that of their own existence, in their effects 
on other things.5)rhirdly, it is sometimes urged that a 
single order, a unity, is observed in the whole of things. 
In each of these cases, it is argued that such marks of 
design point to a designer. 

Finally there is the moral argument w T hich deduces 
the existence of God from the reality of the moral law. 
A variety of this is the aesthetic argument from the 
reality of the experience of beauty. 

This does not quite exhaust the rational element since 
a good deal of thinking at the present time is in the 
direction of trying to found an argument on religious 
experience. The form that this occasionally takes is that 
the religious man has no more reason for denying the 
reality of the objects of his religious experience than he 
has of the objects of his experience of the external 
world, so that the existence of God is as certain for him 
as that of the external world. I intend to discuss these 
questions more fully in my last chapter since this is a 
part of the philosophy of religion almost unavoidably 
raised by a study of its psychology. It should, I think, 
be clear that the particular form of the argument from 
experience which I have just stated is a solution of the 
problem too easy to be of any value. 

I have stated these arguments, not with any intention 
of discussing their truth, but only so that we may have 
an idea of what we are talking about when discussing 
the rational root of religion. The problem I wish to 
discuss is the purely psychological one of how far, in 
fact, belief is determined by processes of reasoning. 
Our estimate of the importance of the rational root 
of religious belief, and of the value of religion of the 
rational type must very largely depend on our answers 


81 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 

to these questions. The whole tendency of modern 
psychology is to tell us that our beliefs are determined 
for us far more by our feelings, our wishes, and so forth, 
and much less by our intellects than we are generally 
willing to admit. In other words they are very largely 
affectively determined. It is true that we may be able 
to give what we consider to be excellent intellectual 
reasons for our beliefs. These, however, may not be the 
real causes of our holding the beliefs. They may merely 
be reasons the mind subconsciously supplies to justify 
it in holding beliefs which are really held on different 
and quite irrational grounds. Such chains of reasoning 
are now generally called rationalisations. 

A rationalisation, then, may be defined as a chain of 
argument used by the mind to justify itself in the hold¬ 
ing of a belief which really owes its origin to something 
else—to suggestion or to some affective root. 

The most obvious examples of rationalisation are to 
be found in insanity. A man suffering from the delusion 
of persecution can find in every event fresh evidence of 
the designs of other people to kill him. Such a belief 
cannot be shaken by argument, since his belief in the 
intention of other people to kill him provides an inter¬ 
pretation of facts apparently as internally consistent as 
that of the sane person. Yet it is quite apparent to 
everyone else that his belief is untrue. It is not really an 
inference from the events he brings forward in its sup¬ 
port, but is a construction imposed on events by his 
mind. 

Dr Hart thus describes the rationalisations of a luna¬ 
tic who believes that his wife is trying to murder him: 

If his wife is solicitous for his welfare her behaviour 
is regarded as a cloak to conceal her real design, if she 



82 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

treats him badly, the evil intentions are clear, if she 
gives him food it is obvious that she proposes to poison 
him, if she does not it is equally obvious that she hopes 
to undermine his health by withholding the necessaries 
of life. If we argue with him and point out that his 
belief is inconsistent with the facts, he smiles con¬ 
temptuously at our credulity, or is perhaps suspicious 
that we are the paid accomplices of his wife. 1 

This process of rationalisation is not, however, con¬ 
fined to insane persons. Most of us will have no diffi¬ 
culty in recognising its action in the minds of other 
people, however unwilling we may be to admit its exist¬ 
ence in our own. Often when conduct or opinions are 
clearly dictated by feeling, a series of reasons is given 
for them which is recognised to be of the nature of a 
rationalisation by everyone except the person himself. 
I will give an example of this from the same book: 

One of my patients, a former Sunday School teacher, 
had become a convinced atheist. He insisted that he 
had reached this standpoint after a long and careful 
study of the literature of the subject, and, as a matter 
of fact, he really had acquired a remarkably wide 
knowledge of religious apologetics. He discoursed at 
length upon the evidence of Genesis, marshalling his 
arguments with considerable skill, and producing a 
coherent and well-reasoned case. Subsequent psycho¬ 
logical analysis, however, revealed the real complex 
responsible for his atheism; the girl to whom he had 
been engaged had eloped with the most enthusiastic 
of his fellow Sunday School teachers. . . . Resentment 
against his successful rival, had expressed itself by a 
repudiation of the beliefs which had formerly consti¬ 
tuted the principal bond between them. The argu- 

1 The Psychology of Insanity, by Dr Bernard Hart (Cambridge, 
1918), p. 86. 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 83 

merits, the study and the quotations were merely an 
elaborate rationalisation. 1 

It is less easy to convince ourselves of the existence of 
rationalisation in our own minds. This is to be expected 
from the fact that we judge ourselves mainly from in¬ 
trospection while we judge the motives of other people 
mainly by inferences from their behaviour. The un¬ 
reality of the apparent connection between beliefs and 
the rationalisations which are supposed to support them 
is not, of course, apparent to introspection, because the 
object of the rationalisation is to satisfy our own 
minds that our beliefs are really held on rational 
grounds. But there are ways by which an honest exami¬ 
nation into our own minds will, I think, convince us that 
we are ourselves guilty of the habit of making rational¬ 
isations. Looking back on our past conduct and beliefs 
and the reasons we gave for them, it is possible to see 
how often those reasons were mere rationalisations. 
They seemed real enough to us at the time, but now 
they have lost their power of convincing us and we see 
how far our real motives were removed from them. Per¬ 
haps the most convincing case is after we have passed 
through a total change of opinion, such as takes place in 
a conversion whether in religion or in some other matter 
as the holding of a scientific theory. The usual experi¬ 
ence of such a change is that evidence accumulated 
against our earlier conviction. But instead of gradually 
undermining our confidence in it, what happened was 
that every new piece of evidence was fitted into our old 
theory by some new piece of reasoning. Then quite 
suddenly the whole structure collapsed, and we saw 
that all the reasonings by which we tried to make our 

1 The Psychology of Insanity, p. 71. 


84 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

new facts fit into our old theory were merely hollow 
devices for retaining our belief unshaken and that they 
had no compelling force at all. Our new theory is soon 
supported by a fresh system of reasons of its own. 

The discovery of the existence of such a process as 
rationalisation leads us to suspect that processes of 
reasoning play a much less important part in the forma¬ 
tion of our beliefs than we like to assign to them. In 
our own subject, we may suspect that what we have 
called the rational element has played a less predomi¬ 
nant part in the formation of religious belief than the 
intellectual vanity of man leads him to suppose. The 
further step of saying that it plays no part at all, and 
that all our processes of reasoning are mere rationalisa¬ 
tions used to justify beliefs really held on other grounds, 
is an obvious one. I think, however, that we shall be 
wise to examine it rather carefully before we take it. 

This position is assumed in psychological controversy 
more often than it is stated. Le Bon is the only person 
in whose works I remember having seen it stated quite 
definitely. Once one has grasped the meaning of ration¬ 
alisation, its use in controversy is fascinatingly easy. 
You need not examine your opponent’s arguments at all. 
You need only state what you imagine to be the affec¬ 
tive grounds of his opinions, and dismiss all his reasons 
as rationalisations. It is not surprising that the method 
is becoming popular. In the whole of thought, I know 
of no other way of refuting an opponent which is effec¬ 
tive, certain, and does not require you to do any thinking 
at all. If you wish to refute religion, you need only 
sketch what I have already described as the affective 
root of religious belief, detailing the needs, etc., which it 
satisfies. You then say that these are the real reasons 
why people believe in religion and that all else is mere 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 


85 


rationalisation. If you wish to refute atheism, your task 
is perhaps even easier. You can find the affective root 
of your opponent’s unbelief in the fact that he is not 
living in conformity with the rigidity of morals which 
is demanded by religion. All his reasons, you say, are 
nothing but rationalisations to cover this moral laxity, 
and once more you are satisfied that your case is com¬ 
plete. I am not suggesting mere unrealised possibilities 
now; arguments of this sort are being increasingly 
used. The wonderful ease of the method should make 
us pause before accepting the implicit assumptions on 
which it is based. 

In fact, these writers generally assume that a suffi¬ 
cient account of their opponent’s reasoning is given by 
stating their affective grounds, but they seem somehow 
to exempt their own. This, of course, is illogical. Affec¬ 
tive grounds can always be found for any opinion, and 
if that were the end of the matter, we would have to 
give up writing books or delivering lectures which were 
anything more than a mere recitation of facts. The fact 
that the statement of the supposed affective grounds of 
his belief was an easy way of triumphing over an oppo¬ 
nent is, of course, no new discovery of modern psy¬ 
chology. Those of you who are close observers of 
human life will have recognised that it has always been 
the principal dialectical method of the arguments which 
take place in the gutter. It has not been unknown in 
more intellectual circles. 

There are two principal directions in which this kind 
of criticism may be found unsatisfactory. The first is 
the fact that there is really no reason at all for suppos¬ 
ing that all reasoning processes are in fact, without 
influence, and a legitimate influence, on the formation 
of belief. Secondly, there is a possibility which must 


86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

be considered with some caution that the determination 
of belief by processes not strictly rational may not be 
altogether a mark of falsity, as our intellectual habits 
of mind tend to lead us to suppose. 

Let us examine with some care the process of mind 
which is involved in a change of opinion, such as the 
change of opinion about some scientific theory. We have 
already looked at this shortly and we saw that rational¬ 
isation played a part in it. Reasons can be produced for 
the original opinion. Some of these may be rationalisa¬ 
tions, but there is certainly no reason for supposing that 
they all are. The mind has probably at first, in coming 
to its opinion, no affective bias one way or the other. 
Then, after the opinion has been formed, experience 
begins to accumulate against the theory. There is now 
a strong affective bias in favour of retaining it. In the 
first place, there is unwillingness to admit that one was 
wrong. Secondly, the evidence may not at first be 
strong enough to overthrow the theory completely, so 
that if its implications were accepted, it would result in 
placing the mind in the unpleasant situation of doubt. 
Therefore the mind normally resists the implications of 
this new experience and creates i rationalisation which 
makes it fit in with the old theory. 

Even with the most honest and careful scientific 
workers the usual attitude towards a fact which seems 
to conflict with their theories is irritation, and either a 
refusal to accept it or else an elaborate rationalisation 
to account for it which seems ridiculous to other people. 
This may go on for some time until the original theory 
is supported by a mass of such rationalisations. But we 
are not justified in concluding that the new facts have 
had no effect on the mind of the investigator. The 
rationalisations are only a temporary device to avoid 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 87 

the existence of a period of uncertainty. If the new 
experience really undermines his theory, a time will 
come when his carefully prepared rationalisations will 
collapse like a house of cards, and he will suddenly 
change his mind. He will then be able to see the un¬ 
reality of some of his old supports. The point I wish you 
to notice about this case is that the investigator does not 
really hold his opinions independently of evidence 
against them. He appears to do so, and his case might 
by a superficial observer be quoted as an example of 
pure rationalisation to show that affective grounds de¬ 
termined the whole of his belief. His beliefs are in fact 
really plastic to the influence of experience. This is 
what I wish to suggest as the essential criterion of a 
rationally held belief. His reasons are, it is true, mixed 
with rationalisations, but so far as they express a real 
moulding influence of experience, they are genuine ones. 
Such plasticity of beliefs to experience is the mark of a 
rational mind. 

We can contrast this with another case. We all know 
the man who goes on resisting experience. As fact after 
fact accumulates against his theories, he goes on elabo- 
xating rationalisation after rationalisation. He may 
spend his whole life without changing his mind. While 
his subject is advancing, he sits in his study writing 
books which are more and more involved, in which he 
fits all the new discoveries into the theories of his youth. 
He is never refuted. His reasons appear marvels of 
ingenuity and consistency, but no one else believes his 
theories and they soon cease to read his books. Their 
elaborate rationalisations are unnecessary to people who 
do not share his affective disposition in favour of his 
theories. He is an example of a man whose opinions are 
not plastic to the influence of experience. We justly 


88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

suspect the reasons he gives us, however consistent they 
may appear. 

While admitting, then, that actually intellectual proc¬ 
esses play a smaller part in the formation of belief than 
we are generally inclined to suppose, they do play some 
part. This part is principally in the criticism and con¬ 
trol of beliefs which may owe their origin in part to 
other causes. The logical consistency of beliefs and their 
perceived coherency with the rest of our knowledge de¬ 
termine whether they shall pass the test of our intel¬ 
lects. To a normally constituted mind, a belief which 
does not satisfy these tests will not permanently be held, 
however much it may be given an appearance of logical 
consistency by being bolstered up by rationalisations. 
The plasticity of .beliefs to the influence of experience is 
the sign by which their rationality may be judged. Any 
reasoning process which does not start from experience, 
such as the ontological argument for the existence of 
God, is quite naturally suspected of being a rationalisa¬ 
tion, however logically rigid it may appear. And, as a 
matter of fact, it is interesting to notice how extraor¬ 
dinarily small its influence has been in the history of 
religious thought. The natural reaction to it is to sus¬ 
pect that there is a catch somewhere, even if the argu¬ 
ment cannot be refuted. The Roman Church has given 
expression to this feeling by laying down that ontolo- 
gism cannot safely be taught. 

In addition, there are the tendencies which have 
already been mentioned to doubt whether the deter¬ 
mination of beliefs by reason is the only criterion of 
their truth. The hackneyed piece of advice, “Give your 
decision boldly for it is probably right, but never give 
your reasons for they will almost certainly be wrong,” 
is often quoted as an example of the implicit recognition 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 


89 


of the process of rationalisation. But it is often forgot¬ 
ten that it also implies that one’s beliefs may in fact be 
true although one’s intellectual defence of them is a 
mere rationalisation. In other words, that the truth has 
been reached by some other process than reasoning. 
The attitude mentioned in the last chapter, of resting 
belief on feeling, is a more extreme example of the 
denial of reason as the final decider in matters of belief. 
Such an epistemology as that of Bergson, in which intui¬ 
tion is regarded as a guide to truth of greater value 
than intelligence, also denies the supreme importance 
claimed for the rational root in the formation of belief 
and therefore in the discovery of truth. 

We will now turn to a study of religion of the rational 
type. This is the type of religion in which either de¬ 
liberately in response to a preconceived theory, or as a 
result of a habit of mind, the rational element receives 
a disproportionate amount of emphasis. It is found in 
all persons of an intellectual habit of mind such as 
philosophers. It is the natural habit of mind of anyone 
at first who is trying to think clearly about these things. 
Those who think clearly enough are generally driven out 
of it, either into scepticism or into a religion which rests 
much more on feeling, by their discovery of the weak¬ 
ness of the position of the rational type of religion. This 
weakness is a double one. There is first the intellectual 
unsatisfactoriness of the so-called proofs of the existence 
of God. Supposed to have compelling force as apodic- 
tically certain proofs, their conclusions can as a matter 
of fact be doubted, and have been doubted by philoso¬ 
phers who are as capable of forming an opinion on 
them as those who have been convinced. Secondly, 
there is the psychological unsatisfactoriness of a posi¬ 
tion which rests on a part only of what forms belief in a 


90 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

normal man. Purely intellectual conviction of the ex¬ 
istence of God means very little until it has become 
associated with feelings and with experience. The mere 
proof of the existence of a supreme being would lead us 
little further towards a religion than the proof of the 
existence of infinite numbers. A man with a religion 
purely of the rational type would be in a worse position 
than the devils who, St James tells us, “believe and 
tremble.” He would believe and remain in a condition 
of the most profound indifference. 

An excellent example of the passage from religion of 
the intellectual type to one in which the affective 
element played a more important part is provided by 
the autobiography of A1 Ghazzali. He was a Moham¬ 
medan professor of theology at Baghdad. He began 
with a religion which was of the traditional and rational 
type. A profound study of Western philosophy, par¬ 
ticularly of Descartes, convinced him of the instability 
of the rational foundation of the belief in God. He 
became completely sceptical, and remained in that state 
for many years. Then he was led back to religion, but 
not by the path of reason. He was, he tells us, redeemed 
by a light which God caused to penetrate into his heart, 
and he became a Sufi (a Mohammedan believer of the 
affective type). 

Having now discussed in turn the five roots of the 
belief in God, the task of the psychology of religion is 
not over. Most of the remaining chapters until we come 
to discuss Conversion and Mysticism will be devoted to 
the attempt to get some insight into what underlies the 
elements which have already been discussed. Our 
treatment of the affective element, for example, was 
conspicuously incomplete. We merely described emo¬ 
tional experiences which contributed to religious belief 


THE RATIONAL ELEMENT 


91 


without ever asking whether psychology could give any 
further explanation of the experiences themselves. This 
is a question which it is impossible to attempt to answer 
without going much farther into the psychology of 
feeling states, of instincts and of the subconscious mind. 
These, therefore, will form the subject of the following 
chapters. 


CHAPTER VII 


CONSCIOUS PROCESSES 

My intention in the present chapter is to spend a short 
time in the discussion of the psychology of conscious 
states, and particularly of the psychology of feeling. In 
any discussion of the psychology of religion, we are con¬ 
stantly talking about emotions, feelings, sentiments, 
etc., and it is as well to make our thought as clear as 
possible about these things. Perhaps more than in any 
other part of psychology, we are faced by the difficulty 
that these words are used in ordinary speech with 
vaguely defined meanings. It is only possible to attain 
the clarity of thought essential to a scientific discussion 
by taking the terms of common speech and giving them 
a strictly definite meaning. So far as possible it is as 
well to keep this meaning somewhere within the limits 
of the meanings our words bear in popular speech, but 
this is not essential. It is clearly impossible to use words 
in the same meaning as they have in their ordinary use, 
partly because this ordinary use is so variable, partly 
because as we begin to refine our thought we find that 
it is necessary to find names for things which have no 
names at all in ordinary language because they are not 
things which the ordinary man has thought of sepa¬ 
rately. 

It may be as well to point out here, that one of the 
difficulties we shall meet with in dealing with the 
historical material for the psychology of religion (par¬ 
ticularly of mysticism) is that we find that, although 

92 


93 


CONSCIOUS PROCESSES 

mental states are often described with real introspective 
insight, these descriptions are usually given in terms of 
a psychology which has been completely abandoned. 
This is the scholastic faculty psychology. Quite briefly, 
the difference between the scholastics’ psychology and 
our own is that they thought of a soul possessing the 
faculties of will, memory, imagination, etc., just as the 
body possesses arms, legs and a head. This conception 
of faculties violates a fundamental principle of scientific 
method—that entities should not be multiplied un¬ 
necessarily. The immediately experienced facts are 
conations, not a faculty of will, memories, not a faculty 
of memory, images, not a faculty of imagination. Since 
we can give a complete description of mind by talking 
about these immediately experienced facts only, we 
have no right to talk about faculties at all, and in 
modern psychology we do not. It is necessary there¬ 
fore, when using data from such writers as the Catholic 
mystics, to translate what they say from the language 
of the scholastic psychology into the language of 
modern psychology. 

It is usual to analyse a complete condition of mind 
at any moment into three elements: cognition, feeling 
and conation. Cognition is used to cover all ways of 
having knowledge of awareness of an object. By object 
is here meant anything that can become an object of 
thought, an abstract idea as well as a material object. 

Feeling is used in widely different senses in ordinary 
speech. We speak of having a feeling of hunger. We are 
then using feeling for an organic sensation. There are 
four other senses in which it is used. The sense in which 
it is to be restricted as an element in all states of con¬ 
sciousness is much the same as our use of it when we 
speak of a feeling of anger or a feeling of displeasure. If 


94 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

we want a name for a unit of feeling, we can call it an 
affect. The whole of the feeling element in our mind at 
any one time we call an affective state. 

Conation is the active element in our conscious life. 
It includes the mental side of voluntary movements, 
and the production of voluntary changes in the chain 
of ideas. The whole system of our conations is what 
was called in the old faculty psychology and in ordinary 
speech the will. 

These three elements are not distinct states of con¬ 
sciousness which may exist in the mind in isolation. 
They are constituents of states of mind in which all 
three exist together. Every complex state of mind con¬ 
sists of cognition, feeling and conation in conjunction. 

Our affects may be divided into two classes, those we 
find pleasant and those we find painful. Pleasantness 
and painfulness are thus qualities of feelings. Strong 
fear has a painful affect, joy has a pleasant one. This 
quality of affects is called jeeling tone or hedonic tone. 
Pain is a word used in so many different senses that it 
is not generally employed as a name for the feeling tone 
opposite in character to pleasure. It is more usual to 
coin a word and to call it unpleasure. The feeling tone 
of an affect is thus its quality of pleasure or unpleasure. 

I wish next to discuss the meaning of the word 
emotion. Emotion is used in two distinct senses by 
psychologists. It does not matter which we adopt since 
it is really only a question of convenience, but it is as 
well to notice the difference, because in reading about 
emotion in psychological text-books, there is alwsfys 
danger of mistaking a difference in the use of words for 
a real difference of opinion about facts. 

The best way of beginning our treatment of emotion, 
is to start, not by a discussion of the meaning of the 


CONSCIOUS PROCESSES 95 

word but of a concrete fact—by trying to find out what 
we mean when we make such a statement as that some¬ 
one is angry. This will be most clear if we do it in 
the form of a diagram. We may notice first of all that 
we mean both something about his state of mind, and 
something about his bodily behaviour. We will begin 
by drawing a line down the middle of the page, and 
putting the particulars of the contents of his mind on 
the left-hand side of the line, and the details of his 
bodily behaviour on the right. 


Mind 

Cognition. Of the cause and 
the object of anger. 

Feeling. A distinctive affect, 
on the whole of unpleasant 
feeling tone. 

Conation. Of striking, etc. 


Body 


Involuntary bodily changes. 
Flushing, increased rapidity of 
heart beat, difficulty of inspira¬ 
tion, etc. 

Behaviour. Striking or clench¬ 
ing the fist. 


Diagram to illustrate the analysis of the emotion of anger. 


The mind of a man when he is angry, as at all other 
times, contains all three elements, cognition, feeling and 
conation, although it is the feeling element which par¬ 
ticularly attracts our attention in the state of anger. 
The cognition may be not very prominent. It includes 
an awareness of, let us say, the affront received and of 
the person with whom the subject is angry. The feeling 
element is a strong and distinctive affect (with a feeling 
tone on the whole unpleasant) which is peculiar to the 
state under consideration. The conation is the mental 
side of the impulse to strike or to clench the fist. On the 
bodily side, there are two kinds of event. There are first, 
a series of involuntary changes—flushing, increased 
rapidity of heart beat, difficulty of inspiration, etc. In 



96 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


addition to these, there are voluntary movements— 
striking or clenching the fist. In the diagram, I have 
put these voluntary movements opposite to the cona¬ 
tions which are the mental aspect of them. The in¬ 
voluntary movements I have put opposite to the feeling 
element in the mind, because in the James-Lange theory 
of the emotions the affect is supposed to be merely the 
organic sensations due to these bodily changes. 

Now we have the alternative of including in the word 
‘emotion/ everything that is on the mind side of the 
central line, or of restricting it to the affect. We can 
call it the total mental state of the man when he is 
angry, or only the feeling element of that total state. 
Professor Ward and Mr Shand choose the first alter¬ 
native. Dr Myers and Dr Prideaux choose the second. 
There is, of course, no question of which is right; it is 
merely a question of convenience. It is only necessary 
to decide which meaning we shall adopt and to use it 
consistently. I intend to adopt the first alternative, and 
to mean by emotion the whole state of mind, using the 
word affect when I wish to refer only to the feeling- 
element. Mr Shand also speaks of the system of the 
emotion , by which he means the whole state of mind 
plus its bodily accompaniments, plus the bodily and 
psychical disposition called an instinct. 

Some emotions, such as awe and contempt, can be 
analysed into simpler emotions; others, such as fear and 
anger, cannot. The former are called complex emotions, 
the latter primary emotions. McDougall, for example, 
analyses awe as a combination of the primary emotions 
of wonder, fear and negative self-feeling (the emotion of 
submission); contempt as a combination of disgust and 
positive self-feeling (elation or the emotion of self- 
assertion). 


CONSCIOUS PROCESSES 97 

There is no exact agreement amongst psychologists 
as to what are the primary emotions. Shand gives fear, 
anger, joy, sorrow, disgust, repugnance and surprise. 
McDougall mentions fear, anger, wonder, disgust, nega¬ 
tive and positive self-feeling and tender emotion (to be 
explained later). My own inclination is to follow Shand 
in retaining joy and sorrow as primary emotions; while 
following McDougall in omitting repugnance, and add¬ 
ing positive and negative self-feeling and tender 
emotion. 

We sometimes experience the affect proper to an 
emotion, without the accompanying cognition of an 
object, so without the possibility of giving vent to the 
distinctive behaviour. An example is when we do what 
is popularly called getting out of bed on the wrong side. 
We have the affect proper to anger, but there is no 
object of our anger. This is called a mood. It is a par¬ 
ticularly unpleasant frame of mind because we cannot 
get the relief we obtain in an emotion of anger by giving 
vent to the behaviour proper to the emotion. For this 
reason, we change an angry mood into an emotion of 
anger as quickly as possible by finding a suitable object 
for our anger. A mood may be defined as a state of 
mind containing the affect proper to an emotion but 
without the associated cognitions. 

We will now leave the consideration of the emotions 
and pass on to mental facts of a more complex type, of 
which we may take hatred as an example. It is clear 
that hatred is not an emotion. It is something of a 
different kind from, let us say, anger. When we say that 
we hate a person, we do not mean that we are, at the 
present moment, having any specific experience con¬ 
nected with him, but that we have a mental disposition 
to experience certain emotions when the object of our 


98 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

hate is in certain situations. We tend to feel sorrow 
when he is happy, joy when he is unhappy, repugnance 
in his presence, and so on. The object of our hate may 
not be in our minds, and then we experience no emotion 
about him at all. But in ordinary language we say that 
we still hate, for the disposition towards the emotions 
is still there ready to be called out as soon as the hated 
object comes again into our thoughts. 

The great service which Mr Shand has performed for 
psychology is to distinguish things of this class and to 
provide them with a name. The name he gives them is 
sentiment. This is not quite the meaning of the word 
sentiment in common speech, but there seems to be no 
word which is more suitable. A sentiment we may 
define as a system of emotional dispositions. The 
difference between it and an emotion is that an emotion 
is an actual experience, a sentiment is only a disposition 
towards experiences of a certain kind. The different 
emotions which the sentiment of hate may call up under 
appropriate conditions are called by Shand, the emo¬ 
tions organised in the system of hate. 

M. Ribot’s word passion in his Essai sur les Passions 
is used in a manner similar to Shand’s sentiment, but he 
defines it quite differently as an intense and prolonged 
emotion. It is a less useful conception, and was never 
very widely adopted by English psychologists, who have 
however been almost unanimous in their welcome of 
Shand’s conception of the sentiment. 

As an example of a sentiment, I might have taken 
love instead of hate. The reason why I did not do so is 
because, although the word love in ordinary speech is 
generally used to describe a sentiment, it is also used 
for an emotion—the pleasurable emotion felt in the 
presence of the object of our love. This ambiguity 


CONSCIOUS PROCESSES 


99 


causes some confusion of thought and may best be re¬ 
moved from psychology by restricting the word love to 
the sentiment of love, and finding a new word for the 
emotion. The name now generally employed for the 
emotion felt in the presence of the object of love is 
tender emotion. 

The fact that love as ordinarily understood is a senti¬ 
ment, and may therefore organise in its system a variety 
of different emotions is one which seems to have been a 
recurring surprise to lovers. It is a discovery which has 
frequently been expressed by them in verse, although 
not always with the precision required by scientific 
psychology. Shand quotes Chaucer and Coleridge as 
examples of this and also the following lines from Swift: 

Love why do we one passion call 
When ’tis a compound of them all? 

Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet, 

In all their equipages meet; 

Where pleasures mix’d w T ith Pains appear, 

Sorrow with Joy, and Hope with Fear. 

In other words, the poet insists that it is incorrect to 
speak of love as a single emotion since it is a sentiment 
which organises in its system all the emotions. The 
latter statement, as will be seen later, is not strictly 
accurate. 

Love is a sentiment which organises in its system 
most of the emotions of hate, but they are called up by 
opposite situations of its object. In love we feel sorrow 
at the unhappiness and at the absence of the object of 
love, joy at his happiness, fear at anything threatening 
the object of love, anger at any person injuring him. 
But the emotion of repugnance called out by the pres¬ 
ence of an object of hate is not found in the system of 


100 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

love at all, and the tender emotion felt in the presence of 
the object of love is not found in the system of hate. 
Tender emotion is, in fact, peculiar to the various forms 
of the sentiment of love. 

You will remember that, in the first chapter we met 
with a definition of religion as a particular kind of emo¬ 
tion. It should be clear that, in the sense in which we 
are using the word emotion, the definition is absurd. 
On its mental side, religion is clearly a sentiment, it is a 
system of emotional dispositions organising in its sys¬ 
tem a variety of different emotions. It is therefore cor¬ 
rect to speak of the religious sentiment. James, it is 
true, denies that there is any specific religious senti¬ 
ment, but he is using sentiment loosely in much the 
same sense as we use emotion. He is not speaking of 
sentiment in the sense in wdiich it is employed by Shand. 
Using sentiment in that sense, we may speak of the reli¬ 
gious sentiment when w r e mean the system of emotional 
dispositions organised around the objects of religion. 

The emotions organised in the religious sentiment 
are, on the whole, the same as those of the sentiment of 
love. We may ask whether there is any specific reli¬ 
gious emotion found organised only in the religious 
sentiment. Probably there is not one which is never 
found in any other sentiment, but the characteristic 
emotion of religion is the highly complex one called 
reverence. McDougall considers that there are few 
human beings able to excite reverence, and that those 
who do are generally regarded as the ministers and 
dispensers of divine power. 

The character of most people is largely compounded 
of a variety of different sentiments. The emotional re¬ 
sponse in any particular situation may be produced by 
the action of the situation on any one of these. It hap- 


CONSCIOUS PROCESSES 


101 


pens sometimes that one of the sentiments establishes 
itself so much in the predominant position that the 
emotional responses of the individual are called out 
from that one sentiment alone. An example of this is 
when the sentiment of love attains such a predomi¬ 
nance temporarily. The sorrow felt at the absence of 
the object of love, is sufficient to counteract the joy 
which should have been produced by the action of the 
environment on the other sentiments; or joy at the 
presence of the object of love prevents the appearance 
of sorrow when that would appear to be the natural 
response of the other sentiments to other elements in 
the situation. 

Similarly religion is ordinarily one amongst many 
sentiments. The emotional response of the individual 
is sometimes called out by the action of the situation on 
that sentiment, sometimes by its action on others. 
When the religious sentiment attains such a predomi¬ 
nance as has just been described for the sentiment of 
love, we have what is called mysticism. In the mystic, 
the religious sentiment has attained such predominance 
that the emotional responses of the mystic are called 
out by that sentiment alone, as those of the lover are by 
his sentiment of love. 


CHAPTER VIII 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 

The attempt to deal with the psychology of the un¬ 
conscious in the space of one short chapter is little less 
ambitious than the aim of the works one sometimes sees 
advertised which profess to reveal the whole plan of 
creation in a pamphlet of thirty pages sold for two¬ 
pence. Practically the whole of the modern psychology 
which has been developed from the study of mental 
disorder is a psychology of the unconscious. The most 
that I can hope to do in the short space it is possible 
to devote to this subject is to give a sufficiently clear 
outline of the theory underlying this work to enable us 
to use the conception of unconscious mental activity in 
an intelligent manner, and to see how incomplete a 
psychology of religion must necessarily be which ignores 
this aspect of mental life altogether. 

Consciousness is a fact which cannot be defined but 
which can easily be understood, since we all experience 
it. Some of our conditions and activities are accom¬ 
panied by an awareness. We are, for example, aware of 
a feeling of fatigue or of a voluntary movement. It is 
this accompaniment of awareness that makes the state 
or activity a conscious one. It is, of course, possible to 
define psychology as the science of consciousness, and to 
refuse to admit into a psychological discussion any other 
facts than facts of consciousness. This, however, is not 
usual at the present time. A large number of facts have 

102 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 103 

been investigated which are most simply accounted for 
by admitting into psychology the idea of mental facts 
whose principal difference from the facts of conscious¬ 
ness is that they are not accompanied by any awareness 
of them. 

As examples, we may take the numerous sensations 
which at any moment are not attended to. At the pres¬ 
ent time you are reading a book. The visual sensations 
of the words of that book are conscious ones. But at 
the same time, there are numerous sensations to which 
you are not attending, and which seem hardly to enter 
into consciousness at all. Such are: the feeling of the 
pressure of your clothes, the ticking of the clock behind 
you, and the motions you are making in breathing. 
They enter into your total state of consciousness to 
some extent ; you would notice their sudden removal 
and you can become aware of them as soon as your at¬ 
tention is directed towards them. As a second example, 
we may take what happens in suggestion. The most 
spectacular case is that of post-hypnotic suggestion. 
This is a suggestion given in the hypnotic trance which 
is to be realised after the subject has come out of the 
trance. The subject is, for example, ordered to take off 
his hat at a certain time. If the experiment is success¬ 
ful, at the stated time he does so, although up to the mo¬ 
ment of its performance he has had no idea that he has 
received the suggestion at all. It violates our usual 
habit of thinking about causation to suppose that in the 
interval the suggestion has completely disappeared 
from the man’s mind and has reappeared from nowhere 
at the time for its realisation. An alternative is to sup¬ 
pose that it has remained in the mind but unconsciously. 
The region of the mind in which it has stayed has 
been called the subconscious, the subliminal and the 


104 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

unconscious . It may be noticed that in this experi¬ 
ment there has also been a subconscious estimation 
of time. 

At one time psychologists recognised subconscious¬ 
ness only of the kind first mentioned—sensations, etc., 
which are only outside consciousness so far as attention 
is directed away from them and those which are too 
weak to enter consciousness. But a very much wider 
kind of subconsciousness is a postulate necessary in 
order to give a satisfactory account of such phenomena 
as post-hypnotic suggestion and of a very large number 
of observations in mental pathology. Objections to the 
conception of unconscious mental processes are urged 
by some of the older psychologists and by philosophers. 
I will not discuss these in detail. It seems to me to be 
possible to formulate a conception of unconscious men¬ 
tal processes which is unobjectionable. The empirical 
facts on which the conception is based cannot be 
doubted. Lhiconscious mental processes are postulated 
in order to provide links to make complete in thought 
an otherwise incomplete chain of mental causation. As 
empirical psychologists, we need claim no more reality 
for them than that. 

We will now consider a few different conceptions of 
unconscious mentality. The words subconscious and 
subliminal and the ideas connected with them were first 
made popular by F. W. H. Myers. He compared the 
human mind with a spectrum, and regarded conscious¬ 
ness as comparable with the visible part of the spectrum, 
and such organic processes as are unconscious he com¬ 
pared with the infra-red part of the spectrum. From 
the part of our life comparable with the ultra-violet 
come the insight of the poet and the inspiration of the 
prophet, religion, mysticism and love. Myers says: 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 105 

It is that prolongation of our spectrum upon which 
our gaze will need to be most strenuously fixed. It is 
there that we shall find our inquiry opening upon the 
cosmic prospect, and inciting us upon an endless way. 

This region has often been called the supraconscious. 
It is unfortunate that this conception has been so popu¬ 
lar. The supraconscious, uprushings from the sublimi¬ 
nal self, and so on, are terms dear to writers on mysti¬ 
cism. Once the phraseology has been mastered, won¬ 
derful possibilities are open to the writer or preacher to 
whom flights of imagination are more congenial than 
clear thinking and the severity of the scientific method. 
There is no limit to what may be said about the spiritual 
life by such writers, for in the supraconscious contradic¬ 
tion is as impossible as verification. The objection to it 
all is that, as a fact, it is founded on no sort of scientific 
evidence at all. Anyone can say anything he likes about 
it because it is a region of which no one knows anything, 
not even its existence. 

This vogue of the supraconscious in religious writing 
has been unfortunate because it has turned attention 
away from the more firmly grounded part of the work 
of F. W. H. Myers, and from the real value to religious 
psychology of the investigations in mental pathology. 
It is to these latter that I wish to draw your attention 
now. Unconscious regions of the mind can be investi¬ 
gated scientifically and it is possible to find out a great 
deal about their nature and the laws of their operations. 
No statement about the mysteries of the subliminal 
which is not based on the results of such investigations 
is worth any more than the speculations of pre-scientific 
astronomy about the influence of the stars on our 
fortunes. 


106 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

It has been made a reproach against the whole of this 
kind of psychology that it is founded on the study of 
diseased minds. That is true, and it is probable that 
exaggerations have sometimes been the result of taking 
over into normal psychology conceptions which had 
their place only in mental disease. Yet this objection is 
not a very serious one. Diseased minds show the same 
general characteristics as healthy ones, and it is their 
lack of balance which enables us to distinguish in them 
processes which are present in healthy ones. We need 
only observe the very obvious precaution of verifying 
their existence in healthy minds. In other words, it is 
no reproach to the psychology of mental pathology that 
it draws its conceptions from a study of persons in a 
state of mental ill-health since it can be proved by 
observation that these same conceptions give us satis¬ 
factory explanations of the workings of the minds of 
ordinary persons. 

A very good idea of the early position of this school of 
psychologists may be obtained by reading Binet’s 
Alterations oj Personality, or any similar work of the 
French psychiatrists, written during the last thirty 
years. In such a book, an investigation into the opera¬ 
tions of the subconscious mind and its laws of working 
will be found. It will be found that subconscious action 
is recognised in the working of suggestion, in the pro¬ 
duction of hallucinations, in somnambulisms and in all 
the phenomena of hysteria. A study of these works, 
however, leaves us vaguely dissatisfied. They are de¬ 
scriptive of the subconscious mind, but they are not ex¬ 
planatory. One seems to be confronted with a vast 
number of facts, whose connection and causation are not 
explained. One feels that, perhaps, the key to the riddle 
lies in the answer to a question to which psychology at 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 107 

that time had found no reply. This question is: “Why 
is there any subconscious?” The attempt to an¬ 
swer it was made by Professor Sigmund Freud of 
Vienna. 

Freud’s contributions to psychology have met with 
a very bitter opposition from a certain number of psy¬ 
chologists and doctors, and from many more people who 
are neither. They have been attacked on moral, on 
aesthetic and on scientific grounds. The intensity of 
this opposition makes it rather difficult to estimate the 
importance and the value of his work. On the whole, I 
am inclined to judge that it is very easily the most im¬ 
portant contribution to the science of psychology that 
has ever been made by one man. He has for the first 
time given us an explanation of the significance of the 
unconscious, upon the brink of which the French psy¬ 
chiatrists seemed often to be, although they never 
reached it. He has also given us a method by which the 
investigation of the unconscious can be carried out. The 
immense value of Freud’s work can be illustrated, as I 
try to illustrate it in a later chapter, by comparing the 
insight it gives us into the psychic mechanisms at work 
in conversion with the amount of insight one could have 
when all that could be said about conversion from the 
psychological point of view was that it was due to 
the subconscious germination of something, without 
any explanation of why it germinated or why it was 
subconscious. 

I do not wish it to be supposed that I am recommend¬ 
ing a complete acceptance of the whole Freudian posi¬ 
tion. The very isolation into which the thought of 
Freud was forced by his long boycott by other workers 
in the same subject has produced the prejudice, the 
exaggerations and the dogmatism in the work of Freud- 


108 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

ians which are always the result of intellectual isolation. 
But, at the same time, it will be as impossible for a 
psychologist of the future to ignore the work of Freud, 
as it would have been for a biologist in the nineteenth 
century to have ignored the work of Darwin. 

The terminology introduced by Freud is very largely 
new, and is not always very convenient. He does not 
use the words subconscious or subliminal at all. He 
uses preconscious to describe that part of the mind con¬ 
sisting of mental elements and processes which are not 
present to consciousness at the time, but which could be 
made conscious by a direction of attention to them. 
Such are: the feeling of the pressure of the clothes while 
the mind is directed towards something else, or a name 
which happens not to be in your mind because you are 
not thinking about it, but which you would remember 
at once if you did think about it, as, for example, the 
name of the town in which you are at present living. 
For things which are actually present in the mind but 
which cannot be made conscious by a mere effort of the 
attention (although they can in certain other ways) he 
uses the word unconscious. As an example of an uncon¬ 
scious mental fact we may take the name which you 
ought to know but which obstinately escapes you when 
you try to recall it. Freud thus recognises three regions 
of mind—the conscious, the preconscious and the un¬ 
conscious. 1 It is his treatment of the unconscious which 
is the original part of his theory. 

1 The confusion of thought which some of Freud’s followers cause 
themselves by a loose use of this terminology is almost unbeliev¬ 
able. There is a small popular handbook on the Freudian psychol¬ 
ogy in which the author, in the course of one short paragraph, uses 
the word “consciousness” in three different senses: (1) in the re¬ 
stricted sense, (2) to mean the conscious plus the Tyreconscious, 
and (3) to mean the conscious plus the preconscious plus the 
unconscious. 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 109 

In discussing Freud’s theory of the unconscious, it is 
quite impossible in a short space to give any adequate 
idea of the evidence on which it is based. A condensed 
and readable account of this is to be found in the first 
fifteen chapters of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho¬ 
analysis. 1 I will try to give a brief account in turn of 
the three most important items in his theory of the 
unconscious. These are: the method by which mental 
material becomes unconscious, the contents of the un¬ 
conscious, and the methods by which the unconscious 
can be unearthed. 

The method by which material becomes unconscious 
is what Freud calls repression. It will be easier to follow 
what I am going to say about this if I give an example 
of repression first and a more general account of it after¬ 
wards. It was a belief of the older psychologists that 
things disappeared from our memories because they 
were weak, and because they called up no strong feel¬ 
ing. That is true of some forgetting, but not of all. 
During the war it was not uncommon for a man to pass 
through some terrible experience which was accom¬ 
panied by the strongest possible feelings, and for that 
experience to be absolutely obliterated from his mem¬ 
ory soon afterwards. This was the cause of a good 
many cases of “shell-shock.” No effort to remember 
could enable such a man to recover his lost memory. It 
had disappeared from his conscious mind as completely 
as if the incident had never happened. Yet it clearly 
had not gone from his mind as a whole. It influenced 
his conduct, his mental health and his dreams. The 
disappearance was not the result of any voluntary 
effort to forget—it was unwitting. Any such effort 
would have been ineffectual. This is a simple case of 

1 London, 1922. 


110 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

repression. It is an unwitting process by which the 
mind relegates to the unconscious painful memories, 
painful conflicts, and the wishes whose presence in con¬ 
sciousness would be painful because of the impossibil¬ 
ity or undesirability of fulfilling them. The word sup¬ 
pression is used of the witting refusal to translate into 
action the impulses to undesirable courses of action 
(such as certain impulses of the primitive instincts). 
Suppression of such impulses is followed either by their 
repression or by their sublimation. 1 One of the practi¬ 
cal problems of religion is to provide an effective means 
of sublimation so that the process of repression (which 
is liable to produce mental disorder) may be avoided. 

The contents of the unconscious are such repressed 
memories and conflicts, and those animal and infantile 
elements in our psyche which are incompatible with the 
demands of civilisation. These superseded primitive 
elements consist in large part of the unchecked im¬ 
pulses of our instincts. In the unconscious, the egoistic 
impulse exists with the ruthless disregard for the needs 
of other people which is characteristic of the young 
child. The sex-impulse makes its demands with the 
disregard for the requirements of morality which be¬ 
longs to a much more primitive stage of evolution. 
There is nothing disgusting about this. The important 
thing ethically is that these libidinous impulses of the 
instincts are suppressed. We have risen from primitive 
morality by our relegation to the unconscious of these 
impulses. The structure of the unconscious shows the 
stages of our evolution in much the same way as the 
vermiform appendix. 

The unconscious shows itself by its influence on con¬ 
duct and by its effect on dreams. We have already had 

1 Cf. pp. 112 and 124. 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 111 

examples of the effect of the unconscious on conduct in 
the discussion of rationalisation. You will remember 
that we met with examples of conduct which were really 
determined by unconscious motives, for which the mind 
made rationalisations in order to avoid the recognition 
of the repressed motive. Another kind of conduct to 
which Freud draws attention is that class of mistakes 
which are found on analysis to have an unconscious 
motive, such as the losing of a present given to us by 
someone we dislike, or the accidental leaving of articles 
at the house of someone we wish to revisit. These 
cases sound fanciful, but I think it is possible to con¬ 
vince ourselves of the reality of the unconscious motive 
in a large number of our own mistakes if we examine 
them carefully. An adequate account of the Freudian 
theory of dreams would take a longer space than we 
can spare now. Essentially they are regarded by him 
as disguised representations in the sleeper’s conscious¬ 
ness of conflicts in the unconscious. 

The method of psychoanalysis is the one which is 
most used in the exploration of the unconscious. We 
wish, let us say, to discover the fact in the unconscious 
which finds expression in a given element in a dream. 
The subject is asked to relax his body and, starting from 
the element in question, to say whatever comes into his 
head without any exercise at all of his critical faculty. 
If this is carried out correctly, it is believed that he is led 
in the end to the unconscious thought of which he is in 
search. It is probable that this method depends in part 
on the subject being in an hypnoidal condition. A diffi¬ 
culty is found in reaching the required unconscious 
thought in psychoanalysis. The subject fails to find 
any association, or has reasoned objections to the 
process. This difficulty is called resistance. It is 


112 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

the result of the fact that the thought in question is 
repressed. 

There is one other conception in psychoanalysis which 
we shall find of value. It was pointed out that the un¬ 
conscious was the seat of libidinous instinctive desires. 
The energy of these repressed desires can be utilised by 
the mind for other purposes, and the enthusiasm for art, 
for religion and for work of all kinds is supposed to be 
made possible by the utilisation for such higher pur¬ 
poses of the energy of these instinctive desires. This 
process of the utilisation for higher ends of energy de¬ 
rived from the repression of instincts is called subli¬ 
mation. 

Freud gives an illustration of the relation of the un¬ 
conscious, the preconscious and the conscious, w T hich 
(although it makes no claim to be satisfactory in all 
respects) may help to make his meaning clear. He 
imagines consciousness as an observer in a small room. 
This room is the preconscious. It is curtained off from 
a larger room which is the unconscious. This room is 
full of people whom it is undesirable that the observer 
in the small room should see. The resistance which pre¬ 
vents them from coming into the smaller room is sup¬ 
plied by a man at the curtain who refuses to allow the 
undesirable people to pass him. He is what Freud calls 
the censorship. If someone passes the censorship, he 
enters the small room, but, of course, he will not be seen 
unless the observer happens to look at him. A thought 
entering the preconscious does not become conscious 
unless attention is directed towards it. In the same 
illustration, Freud’s theory of the dream would be that 
in sleep the vigilance of the doorkeeper was to some 
extent relaxed so that he allowed the undesirable people 
to pass him if they did so in such disguise that they 
would not be recognised by the observer. 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 113 

For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I have given 
Freud’s own views without pointing out where they 
may be criticised. It is necessary, however, to mention 
that even those who agree with his main conceptions 
would not accept everything I have described. Dr 
Rivers, for example, considers that the whole conception 
of the censorship is misleading, and he regards as a 
fantastic and unnecessary explanation the idea that the 
dream is a disguise to evade the censorship. 

I need hardly point out how very far removed is the 
unconscious which scientific investigation reveals to us 
from the subliminal of F. W. H. Myers. It is, however, 
the only subconscious we have any right to use in the 
psychology of religion, if our aim is to make its study 
scientific. 

I will not go in detail into the ways in which the con¬ 
ception of the unconscious has a bearing on the prob¬ 
lems of religious psychology. It will be more conven¬ 
ient to consider these problems as they arise in the 
course of later chapters and to be content now with the 
attempt to make the conception of the unconscious 
clear. We have already met with points where it was 
necessary to postulate something more than conscious 
processes of mind. An example to which I have already 
referred in the course of the present chapter, is when an 
intellectual chain of reasoning appears as a disguise for 
an affective determination of an opinion or a course of 
conduct. In general, we may say that introspection 
does not necessarily give us a true account of the rea¬ 
sons for an action or an opinion, since introspection re¬ 
veals only the elements which are conscious. This is an 
important fact for the psychology of religion, since it 
shows how hopeless must be the attempt to obtain our 
data from introspection alone. We must draw our con- 


114 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

elusions from a study of religious behaviour as well as 
from what religious people tell us. 

A second example of unconscious mental action which 
we have already met is suggestion. The essential part 
of suggestion, the process by which the suggestion re¬ 
ceived is transformed into an opinion or an action, is not 
conscious. For this reason, suggestion has been defined 
as the subconscious realisation of an idea. This is a sim¬ 
pler definition than the one previously given, and has 
the advantage of leaving open the question whether the 
idea was received from someone else, was originated 
deliberately by the person in whose mind it appears, 
or was originated by himself accidentally. 

A third point in connection with the unconscious I 
wish to discuss here is symbolism. The manner of 
thinking, which we may call directed thinking, is a vol¬ 
untary activity. It employs mostly words, and is a 
function acquired late in evolution. A more primitive 
kind of thinking in which words are replaced by concrete 
images is developed when the mind is in the condition of 
reverie, and is, according to the psychoanalysts, found 
in the unconscious. This is more nearly allied to the 
manner of thinking of primitive peoples, as is shown by 
the construction of their language, and is probably the 
way we thought in early childhood . 1 It is, of course, the 
way we think in dreams now. If an image has a fairly 
uniform meaning for different people it is called a sym¬ 
bol. Unconscious thinking tends to use symbols. That 
is one explanation of the very large part symbolism 
plays in religion (I shall point out later that it is not the 
whole explanation). We all know that if we wish to 

ir The term, the infantile psyche, is often used for that part of 
the mind of a grown-up person which thinks and reacts in this 
infantile way now. 


THE UNCONSCIOUS 115 

appeal to something more than the surface of the minds 
of an audience we must speak in symbols. No reasoned 
justification of the British Empire or of Karl Marx’s 
social theories will make the same appeal to an audience 
as a vague phrase about the glorious Union Jack upon 
which the sun never sets or about the red flag which 
waves the way to freedom. These are symbols, and 
however meaningless they may appear when intellectu¬ 
ally analysed they have a strong affective appeal be¬ 
cause their appeal reaches the unconscious processes of 
thought. This suggests a reason why it is not really 
practical wisdom to try to reduce the symbolism of a 
religion, however foolish parts of that symbolism may 
sometimes appear to our intelligence. A reduction of 
symbolism means a weakening of the hold religion has 
on the unconscious modes of thinking, and therefore its 
particular weakening of those whose power of directed 
thinking is not very highly developed. 

A good example of this kind of thinking in religion is 
provided by the authors of a recently published work 
on an Indian mystic. They say: “he thinks in pictures. 
For him an analogy or illustration is not merely a means 
to establish an argument; it is often the argument it¬ 
self.” 1 Such an illustration is provided a few pages 
later. 

At one time I was a good deal perplexed about the 
doctrine of the Trinity. I had thought of three sep¬ 
arate Persons sitting as it were on three thrones; but 
it was all made plain to me in a Vision. I entered in 
an Ecstasy into the third heaven. I was told that it 
was the same to which St Paul was caught up. And 
there I saw Christ in a glorious spiritual body sitting 

1 The Sadhu, by Streeter and Appasamy, p. 53. 


116 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

on a throne. . . . The first time I entered Heaven I 
looked round about and I asked, “But where is God?” 
And they told me, “God is not to be seen here any 
more than on earth, for God is Infinite. But there is 
Christ, He is God, He is the image of the Invisible 
God, and it is only in Him that we can see God, in 
heaven as on earth.” And streaming out from Christ 
I saw, as it were, waves shining and peace-giving, and 
going through and among the Saints and Angels, and 
everywhere bringing refreshment, just as in hot 
weather water refreshes trees. And this I understood 
to be the Holy Spirit . 1 

The weakness of this kind of thinking lies in its 
freedom from the possibility of logical testing. It is 
only so far as doctrines can be translated into words 
that we can argue about their truth or falsity. I am 
by no means satisfied that his biographers are just to 
the Sadhu when they say that an analogy or illustra¬ 
tion is for him itself an argument. So far as in re¬ 
ligious thinking apt illustration replaces argument, 
such thinking lays itself open to the charge of 
infantility. 

1 The Sadhu, by Streeter and Appasamy, pp. 55 and 56. 


CHAPTER IX 


THE INSTINCTS 

When we have grasped the distinction between an 
emotion (an actual experience) and a sentiment (a 
mental disposition determining that experience), we are 
naturally led to ask ourselves whether the sentiments 
are produced by experience in a mental organisation it¬ 
self formless, or whether there are behind them mental 
and neural dispositions which determined their starting 
and influenced their growth. If we consider the devel¬ 
oped character as a complex building of which the senti¬ 
ments are the constituent parts (the walls, the roof, 
etc.), we may ask whether the original lines of the walls 
merely followed the caprice of the builder or whether he 
was working on previously existing foundations whose 
form we may deduce by a study of the existing structure 
of the building. It is now generally supposed that there 
are such dispositions in the mental organisation of man 
which determine very largely the influence of experience 
in the development of his mind. These are called 
instincts. Instincts are the innate mental dispositions 
which are common to all the members of any one spe¬ 
cies. They play a large part in determining the behav¬ 
iour of the lower animals; and so far as man is influ¬ 
enced by instincts, these are an inheritance from his 
animal ancestry. 

Before going on to discuss the bearing of the psy¬ 
chology of instinct on our subject, we may notice the 
extraordinary looseness with which the word is corn- 

117 


118 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

monly used, even by persons who make some claim to 
exact thinking. It is, for example, clearly at variance 
with the plain meaning of the word to use it for any 
activity which is developed only on a high level of cul¬ 
ture, and even more incorrect to use it for anything de¬ 
veloped during any individual’s life-time. Yet it is not 
unusual to hear people speak of the Englishman’s 
instinctive love of fair play, or to read of a chess player 
who makes the correct moves by instinct, while many 
people justify all their irrational prejudices in politics 
by an appeal to a vague instinct. In no subject has this 
vagueness and inaccuracy been more common than in 
the psychological study of religion. 

In our definition of instinct, we spoke of it as innate. 
It is inherited, not acquired during the individual’s own 
life-time. This serves to distinguish an instinct from a 
habit. Shaving, for example, however mechanically it 
may be performed, is a habit and not an instinct, since 
it is entirely acquired during the individual’s life, and 
owes nothing to heredity. An instinct is a mental dis¬ 
position. We speak of instinctive behaviour, instinctive 
emotions, etc., but the word instinct itself refers neither 
to the behaviour nor to the emotion but to the disposi¬ 
tion to behave, to feel, etc., in this particular way in the 
particular circumstances. 

There is little doubt that the emotions and behaviour 
of the lower animals are determined by that something 
innate in their physiological and mental make-up, to 
which we give the name of instinct. We have all noticed 
the intense emotion produced in a dog by the objects of 
his emotions. He quivers with excitement when his 
hunting instinct is aroused, and shows anger when his 
instinct of aggression leads him to fight with other dogs. 
Equally clear is the uniformity of the impulse to be- 


119 


THE INSTINCTS 

haviour dictated by instinct. Ordinarily the dog will 
give chase as soon as he sees a rabbit. Even if he has 
been trained not to do so and this impulse to give chase 
is checked, the existence of the inhibited impulse is clear 
to an observer of the dog’s behaviour. Are the thought 
and conduct of man also determined by innate disposi¬ 
tions, or are such dispositions as we find in him acquired 
during the course of his life? This is a question which 
must be faced seriously by the student of the psychology 
of religion, for if the behaviour and emotions of man are 
determined to any considerable extent by instinct, we 
can attain only a very superficial understanding of the 
behaviour and the emotions found in religion, unless we 
study something of the instincts which might influence 
them. 

Before evolutionary biological theory had won general 
acceptance, the answer to this question was supposed to 
be a simple one. The piety of the middle of the last cen¬ 
tury used to say that God had endowed the animals with 
instinct and man with reason. It was generally assumed 
that the mental lives of animals and men were so differ¬ 
ent that no common factor could be found in them. 
More recent psychology, however, has shown a steady 
tendency to move away from this position, and the im¬ 
portance of the instincts in determining the behaviour 
and the thought of men has been increasingly recog¬ 
nised. 

Let us review briefly the psychological facts on which 
this opinion is based. It is true that, compared with the 
young of other animals, the human baby comes into the 
world in a very helpless condition. This fact might be 
used to support the opinion that it had no innate dispo¬ 
sitions to guide it, but acquired them (perhaps by the 
teaching of its mother) as its intelligence grew. This, 


120 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


however, is a conclusion more extreme than the facts 
justify. The baby has the instinct of nutrition devel¬ 
oped to a small extent (but as much as is required for its 
own preservation) in the sucking reflex. Other instincts 
are developed later. It may be noticed that for a dispo¬ 
sition to be innate, it is not necessary that it should be 
operative immediately after birth. The sexual instinct, 
which is perhaps the most marked innate psychophysi¬ 
cal disposition which man shares with the animals, is not 
fully developed until many years of his life have elapsed. 

It is when we turn to the simple activities of man, 
which are most nearly related to those of the lower ani¬ 
mals, when we watch him hunting, fighting or making 
love, that we see most clearly the traces of a set of men¬ 
tal dispositions which do not seem to be at bottom dif¬ 
ferent from those of the animals. Even in such high- 
level activities as his social organisations, we may see at 
work the same instincts as are found to bind together the 
herd of gregarious animals. Much more obviously, 
many an undergraduate who walks down King’s Parade 
in a yellow waistcoat during the Easter Term is doing 
the same thing, at the same time of the year and for the 
same reason, as the peacock displaying his tail. 

In our consideration of the instincts which influence 
human life, we may conveniently follow a classification 
adopted by Dr Rivers in his Instinct and the Uncon¬ 
scious} He divides them into three groups: those con¬ 
nected with the preservation of the individual, the race 
and the herd, respectively. 

The instincts which have for their object the preser¬ 
vation of the individual include both those which sub¬ 
serve principally the end of nutrition, and also those 
which determine his conduct in danger ( e.g . the instinct 

*pp. 51 and 52. 


THE INSTINCTS 


121 


of flight and of aggression). We may group these under 
the name of the instincts of self-preservation. The 
individual deficient in these instincts would, in a wild 
state, be quickly eliminated by starving to death or by 
falling a prey to some other animal. 

There are, however, other very strong instincts which 
have no survival value to the individual possessing 
them. The sex-instinct and the parental instinct are 
examples. Any particular animal deficient in these in¬ 
stincts would be in no way handicapped in the struggle 
for existence. Its chance of survival would indeed be 
increased, for it would be free from the dangers to which 
these two instincts frequently expose their possessors. 
Many a wild mother must have been torn to pieces be¬ 
cause she attempted to save her young, when she might 
have survived if she had taken to flight; and many male 
individuals must have been sacrificed to the sex-instinct, 
when they have lost their lives in a combat for the fe¬ 
male which common prudence (the warning voice of the 
instincts of self-preservation) would have counselled 
them to avoid. Yet, in spite of the dangers to which 
they expose the individual, these two instincts are of 
fundamental importance for the survival of the race. If 
any species of animal, whose young need the care of the 
mother for some time after birth, were to produce 
females deficient in the maternal instinct, that species 
would quickly die out, through the failure of the mem¬ 
bers of the new generation to survive. In the same way, 
a race of animals would die out through failure to pro¬ 
duce offspring if its members were deficient in the sex- 
instinct. 

Gregarious animals have also a set of instincts which 
have as their object the preservation of the herd. We 
may imagine a herd of animals whose members pos- 


122 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

sessed only those instincts directed towards the preser¬ 
vation of the individual, so that when the herd was in 
danger each was concerned only with his own safety and 
not with that of the herd. It is clear that such a herd 
would be very helpless compared with one in which each 
individual was ready to sacrifice himself for the safety 
of the herd as a whole. The classical description of the 
gregarious instinct is the account of the Damara oxen in 
Gal ton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty. He describes 
how the ox, although it seems to have little affection for, 
or individual interest in, its fellows 

cannot endure even a momentary severance from his 
herd. If he be separated from it by stratagem or force, 
he exhibits every sign of mental agony; he strives 
with all his might to get back again, and w T hen he suc¬ 
ceeds, he plunges into its middle to bathe his whole 
body with the comfort of closest companionship. 

Galton himself was interested in the Damara oxen be¬ 
cause he thought he saw a parallelism between their 
behaviour and that of human beings. This parallelism 
is now explained by the assumption that they spring 
from the same instinctive roots. The gregarious instinct 
is the root from which springs the human being’s un¬ 
easiness at separation or isolation from other men, and 
makes him sensitive to that influence of herd-sugges¬ 
tion on which the safety and the well-being of social 
groups very largely depend. From this root also comes 
a large part of his altruistic impulses. 

If we acknowledge, then, that man has inherited from 
his animal ancestors these three sets of instincts, it 
follows that no account of his psychical life (even in its 
highest manifestations) can be complete without a con¬ 
sideration of their influence upon him. But, while we 


123 


THE INSTINCTS 

recognise that much of his behaviour is not (at least in 
its beginning) intelligent in the sense that it is deter¬ 
mined by previous experience, we must be on our guard 
against the opposite error of exaggerating the part 
played by instinct in the determination of human be¬ 
haviour. Probably it would be such an exaggeration if 
we were to suppose that even in the examples given—of 
fighting, hunting and making love—we saw merely the 
action of unchanged instincts, and that these activities 
were in no sense forms of intelligent behaviour. 

The truth seems to be that the history of the mental 
development of a human being is the history of the re¬ 
placement of purely instinctive behaviour by behaviour 
of the same kind determined by habit, and modified by 
mental processes of the complex kind which we may 
describe as intelligent thinking. It can be shown that 
an unexercised instinct may atrophy. William James 
points out in his Principles of Psychology that a calf 
prevented from sucking in the first few days of its life 
does not afterwards begin to do so; chickens shut away 
from their mother for eight or ten days after hatching 
will after that time run away from her instead of obey¬ 
ing her call. The instinct of these animals seems to be 
normally the starting-point of a habit. If the habit is 
not formed at the proper time, the instinct disappears so 
the habit cannot be acquired later. It is natural to infer 
that the instinct dies away in any case, and that what is 
seen afterwards is only the habit formed on the founda¬ 
tion of the instinct. This illustrates the practical diffi¬ 
culty in making a satisfactory distinction between in¬ 
stinctive behaviour and habit. It is clear that instincts 
vary enormously in the extent to which they die away if 
they are not followed by the behaviour proper to them. 
Some instincts if they are weakened by disuse, certainly 


m THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

do not disappear completely, for their impulses remain 
through the greater part of life even when they are 
never exercised. 

What is most distinctive of human development is 
the extent to which the habits formed by man on the 
basis of his instincts are modified by the more complex 
ways of behaving which he owes to his higher mental 
organisation. His sex-instinct may lead him to marry 
a wife, and to devote the rest of his life to the main¬ 
tenance and protection of her and her offspring. In this 
case, he is forming on his sex-instinct a habit which is its 
biological intention. But it may also drive him (partic¬ 
ularly if his first or repeated attempts to form a habit of 
the above kind are frustrated) to write poetry, to shut 
himself up away from the world, to devote himself to 
scientific research, to paint pictures, or to engage in a 
variety of other activities which are as remote as can 
well be imagined from the kinds of habit which other 
animals found on the same instinct. In this case, we 
may say that he is redirecting the energy of this instinct 
to other (perhaps we may think to higher) ends. It is 
now usual, when the end is recognised to be of value, to 
call this process sublimation. 

We now come to the question: “Is the religious senti¬ 
ment based on an instinct, and if so, on what instinct?” 
I have asked “Is the religious sentiment?” not “Is 
religion?” based on an instinct, because there is a part 
of religion—the rational element—which clearly does 
not come into the question at all. There have been 
several different answers to this question. In the first 
place, some writers have spoken of the religious instinct 
implying that the religious sentiment is based on an 
instinct specifically religious. For example, Starbuck 
speaks of religion as a deep-rooted instinct , and com- 


THE INSTINCTS 125 

pares it with hunger and the desire for exercise. Others 
have said that religion is based on an instinct indeed, 
but that this instinct is the sex-instinct. This has been 
maintained by a school of American writers on the 
psychology of religion who have styled themselves 
erotogenesists. This is a subject which I propose to 
discuss more fully in the next chapter. Mr Trotter in 
his Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, seems to 
consider that religion is founded on the herd-instinct. 
The theory of Professor G. Elliot Smith and Mr W. J. 
Perry, that the first impulse towards certain early reli¬ 
gions was the effort to find givers of life which should 
preserve the individual’s existence, would make such 
religions a growth from the instinct of self-preservation. 

This is an aspect of the problems connected with 
religion which has only recently been brought to the 
front by the modern psychological study of instinct. A 
writer would lay himself open to a well-deserved charge 
of presumption if he claimed to give a final solution of 
the problems raised. All that he can hope to do is to 
suggest the lines along which these solutions may be 
sought, and to point out the falsity of a few of the 
alluringly simple solutions which have little to recom¬ 
mend them except their simplicity. 

If we have admitted the multiplicity of the conscious 
roots of religious belief, we should be prepared to dis¬ 
trust these too simple solutions which assert that reli¬ 
gion is entirely the product of one specified instinct, and 
to expect rather to find that it is a complex growth from 
a variety of instincts. This I believe to be the case. 
The satisfaction which religion gives to, let us say, the 
herd-instinct is not, indeed, the same as that given by 
association with our fellow-men. It is a sublimation of 
the instinct. The energy of the instinct is used in a new 


126 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


kind of activity. But the instinctive basis of a religious 
activity often gives its own colouring to that activity. 
Examples of this will be discussed later. 

The instincts of self-preservation seem clearly to be 
connected with what we have called the Providence 
element in religion—that element which looks to God as 
a provider for our immediate needs—and with a part of 
the demand for immortality. It is also connected with 
the self-interested tendencies which come into conflict 
with the requirements of the religious society. The sex- 
instinct is similarly connected with the demand for a 
worthy object of love and wflth the demand for a giver 
of love; the gregarious instinct with the high valuation 
of the social group as compared with the individual 
which results in the sentiment developed round the 
church and in the religious individual’s respect for 
traditional authority. 


CHAPTER X 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 

The subject of the present chapter—the relation be¬ 
tween religion and the instinct of sex—is a question 
which has been forced to the front by recent tendencies 
in psychology. The hesitation which may be felt at any 
attempt to handle the scientific treatment of the psy¬ 
chology of religion must be felt with double force in 
attempting to deal with a problem so delicate and so 
difficult as this. My excuse for not evading the subject 
altogether must be the same as the reason given in the 
first chapter for refusing to abandon the attempt to 
consider religion from the point of view of scientific 
psychology—that we were raising no new problems but 
discussing problems already raised by a large number of 
people. It must surely be better for the welfare of 
religious thought that these questions should be dis¬ 
cussed not only by those who are frankly enemies of 
religion, but that they should also be investigated by 
those who are sympathetic to it. 

Our typical statement of the tenets of the eroto- 
genesists may be taken from the contributions to the 
American Journal of Religious Psychology , by Mr 
Theodore Schroeder. His theory can be summed up in 
two statements. First, that all religion is a misinterpre¬ 
tation of sex feeling. Secondly, that religion is there¬ 
fore completely discredited. Both of these statements 
seem to be open to question. 

127 



\ 


x 


128 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

» 

His own formulation of the first point is as follows: 

all religion in its beginning is a mere misinterpretation 
of sex-ecstasy, and the religion of to-day is, only the, 
essentially unchanged, evolutionary product, of 
psycho-sexual perversion. . . . Thus literally may we 
say “God is love”—sex-love, sometimes in disguise and 
indistinctly recognised as such, by the lover whose love¬ 
sick longings even now create a god to take the place of 
the undiscovered and much-craved human lover . 1 

I do not propose here to deal with this position. I 
have already tried to show in print its shallowness and 
weakness, and the absurdities of a great part of Mr 
Schroeder’s defence . 2 There is one point which perhaps 
demands notice at this stage. It will be found that at 
the outset the erotogenesists load their dice by defining 
religion so as to inolude only what we have called the 
affective element. A supporter of Mr Schroeder ex¬ 
plains what he means by religion, as follows: 

He [Mr Schroeder] finds that religion is a subjective 
experience, ecstatic in its nature, ascribed to the so- 
called “transcendental 1 ’ and interpreted as certifying 
to the inerrancy of some doctrine or ceremonial which 
through human means serves personal ends, the latter 
also supposed to be wholly or in part of a superphysical 
order . 3 

r 

This limiting of religion to a subjective experience is a 
totally unwarranted simplification of the problem. 

I do not deny (indeed I emphasise) the importance of 
the facts which Mr Schroeder brings forward. I even 

1 Journal of Religious Psychology, vol. vi. 

2 Article, “Religion and the Sex-Instinct,” Psyche. Oct. 1921. 

3 “The Problems and Present Status of Religious Psychology,” 
Van Teslaar, Journal of Religious Psychology . Nov. 1914. 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 129 

suggest that they are so important that no theory of the 
psychology of religion deserves any consideration unless 
it takes them into account. But the essential require¬ 
ment of this theory is that it should be shown that reli¬ 
gion contains nothing but elements of this kind, and 
this is exactly what Mr Schroeder makes no attempt at 
all to prove. 

Before proceeding to the discussion of the relationship 
between the sex-instinct and religion, it will be well to 
try to rid our minds of a prejudice which tends to warp 
any judgment on such a question. This is the feeling 
that there is something inherently disgusting about the 
sex-instinct which makes the mere suggestion of a con¬ 
nection between religion and sex revolting. There is 
plainly neither moral good nor evil in the instincts 
themselves. Moral value lies in the due subordination 
amongst themselves of the conflicting systems of in¬ 
stincts and in their control by our higher mental func¬ 
tions. The sex-instinct is at the root of all the highest 
expressions of human character which can be called out 
by love at its best, as well as of the depravity which we 
commonly call sexuality. There is no reason why we 
should feel willing to admit that the herd-instinct and 
the parental instinct may play a part in the determina¬ 
tion of religious behaviour, but feel horror at the sug¬ 
gestion that the sex-instinct also does. 

It is important to get rid of this prejudice because it 
is to it alone that a certain class of attacks on religion 
owe their sting. A book was published recently by 
C. Cohen, called Religion and Sex, which was little more 
than an enumeration of all the connections the author 
could find between religion and the sex-instinct. It is 
intended as an attack on religion. The author is defend¬ 
ing no thesis like that of the erotogenesists, but is quite 


130 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

satisfied that the mere enumeration of such connections 
is sufficient to discredit religion. 

What are we to conclude from the failure of the the¬ 
ory of erotogenesis? That the religious sentiment is in 
no way connected with the instinct of sex? That would 
fail to account for the observed facts, which are dis¬ 
cussed later. If the evidence shows that there is a 
connection, it must be our purpose to find out what 
that connection is, how far-reaching it is, and what is its 
significance for religion. 

First, we may consider what sort of evidence may 
reasonably be looked for as an indication that the 
religious sentiment is rooted in a particular instinct. 
There are several different kinds of evidence which are 
relevant. In the first place, if an instinct is not uni¬ 
formly in action during the whole of the life-time of the 
individual but has a period of development and decay, 
we should expect to find that, so far as it is based on that 
instinct, the religious sentiment shows similar varia¬ 
tions. Secondly, so far as it is based on an instinct, we 
should expect to find the religious sentiment expressing 
itself in language characteristic of the sentiment nor¬ 
mally developed from that instinct. Thirdly, we should 
'expect to find religious practice particularly concerned 
with the suppression of the normal behaviour charac¬ 
teristic of that instinct. Fourthly, we might expect to 
find a tendency for religion of a highly emotional but 
ill-controlled type to develop into an uncontrolled 
normal exercise of the instinct. 

We find, in fact, that all of these tests yield positive 
results when applied to religion and the sex-instinct. 
Certain types of religious excitement and certain phases 
of religious development show a correspondence with 
the times of the crises of the sex-life. The expressions 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 131 

of religious emotion (particularly those of the mystics) 
are very generally in the language of human love. Reli¬ 
gion has, on the whole, tended to attach a great value to 
chastity. Finally, there is a tendency for religious ex¬ 
citement of a certain kind to pass into sexual license. 
At the same time, a closer examination of these facts 
does not lead us to suspect that religion is merely a 
development from the sex-instinct. On the contrary, 
the indications are clearly in the opposite direction. 
We shall see that this is the case when we examine each 
of these four classes of facts in turn. 

First, we will consider the connection between the 
development of religion in the individual and of his sex- 
instinct. The most striking example of this connection 
is to be found in the tendency for religious conversions 
to take place (in those communities which attach a 
high value to conversion) some time during the period 
of adolescence. This was a subject which was particu¬ 
larly studied by Starbuck, and his results are published 
in his Psychology of Religion. He sums up his conclu¬ 
sions as follows: 

Conversion is a distinctly adolescent phenomenon. 
It is a singular fact also that within this period con¬ 
versions do not distribute themselves equally among' 
the years; in the rough, we may say they begin to occur 
at seven or eight years and increase in number gradu¬ 
ally, to ten or eleven, and then rapidly to sixteen; 
rapidly decline to twenty, and gradually fall away after 
that, and become rare after thirty. . . . The event 
comes earlier in general among the females than among 
males, most frequently at thirteen and sixteen. Among 
males it occurs most often at seventeen and imme¬ 
diately before and after that year. . . . Conversion 
and puberty tend to supplement each other in time 


132 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

rather than to coincide; but they may, nevertheless, be 
mutually conditioned. 

Similar evidence is given by a large number of revival 
preachers, and in Dr Hall’s Adolescence. The main 
differences in the new religion of the adolescent convert 
are its increased emotional content, and the fact that it 
is much more a product of his own experience and much 
less of what he has been taught. In the language of the 
first chapter, the traditional element in his religion has 
grown less and the experiential element greater. Star- 
buck has also shown that a similar change takes place at 
the same age even in those cases of religious develop¬ 
ment, which are not accompanied by the sharp change 
which we call conversion. This seems to point to the 
fact that the sex-instinct contributes something to the 
experiential element in religion. But the evidence is 
very much against its contributing everything. Emo¬ 
tional religion is not entirely absent in childhood. Some¬ 
times, though rarely, the intense emotional experiences 
of mysticism have occurred before adolescence. And 
there is little evidence of a corresponding decay of emo¬ 
tional religion in old age w T hen the sex-life is past. 

We now turn to the second point, the tendency of reli¬ 
gious emotion to express itself in the language of human 
love. This is common amongst the mystics. Thus 
St John of the Cross, in The Dark Night of the Soul , 
describes the mystic union in the following stanzas: 

On my flowery bosom, Kept whole for Him alone, 
There He reposed and slept; and I cherished Him, and 
the waving of the cedars fanned Him. 

As His hair floated in the breeze, That from the 
turret blew, He struck me on the neck, With His gentle 
hand. And all sensation left me. 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 133 

I continued in oblivion lost, My head was resting on 
my love; Lost to all things and myself, And, amid the 
lilies forgotten, Threw all my cares away. 

This is characteristically the language of human love. 
Such language is also found in popular devotions, but 
much more rarely than amongst the mystics. Some 
hymns show this tendency. Yet even amongst the mys¬ 
tics the use of language of this kind is not so universal as 
would be required by a theory which asserts the identity 
of human love and religion. When the mystic discovers 
the insufficiency of ordinary language to describe his 
experiences, he uses symbolism drawn from all parts of 
life. He speaks of a divine lover, of betrothals and of a 
spiritual marriage; but he also uses the symbolism of 
listening to music and of tasting or smelling. 

Thirdly, there is the high value placed by religion on 
chastity; in other words, on the total suppression of the 
sex-instinct. This again is most marked in mysticism. 
There has certainly been a tendency in historical Chris¬ 
tianity to regard marriage rather as a concession to 
human weakness than as anything good in itself. It is 
easy to exaggerate this tendency, as Feuerbach does 
when he says: “Marriage in itself is, in the sense of per¬ 
fected Christianity, a sin, or rather a weakness, which is 
permitted or forgiven” only on condition that it is 
monogamous. But amongst the mystics a very high 
valuation of chastity is clearly seen to exist. Absolute 
chastity, the complete denial of the consolations of 
human love, seems to the mystic to have been the neces¬ 
sary condition for his enjoyment of the divine. But, on 
the other hand, we must notice that in this respect the 
sex-instinct does not stand alone. The suppression of 
other instincts is regarded by the mystics as of equally 


134 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


high religious value. Meekness, fasting and solitude, 
as well as chastity, are necessary methods of approach 
to the highest religious life. Meekness is a name for the 
suppression of the self-assertive impulses which belong 
to the instincts of self-preservation; fasting is the sup¬ 
pression of the instinct of nutrition; and solitude is a 
method of suppressing the gregarious instinct. The 
freeing of the self from all desire, not merely from 
sexual desire, is required from the mystic. 

Fourthly, we must glance at the tendency of religion 
of a certain kind to develop into sexual license. If the 
development of the religious sentiment takes place in 
part by the repression of the normal mode of develop¬ 
ment of the sex-instinct, cases in which this normal 
mode breaks out in a violent form need not surprise us. 
Fortunately such cases are rare. They are to be found 
in the sects which have combined religion with the prac¬ 
tice of promiscuous sexual intercourse. These have 
been known in all ages from some of the bodies which 
sprang out of the early Christianity to modern ones 
which have risen in Russia and the United States. 
Many of these started with an exaggerated over-valua¬ 
tion of chastity, a fact which lends support to the expla¬ 
nation here suggested. A fuller account of them will be 
found in Mr Cohen’s Religion and Sex. 

To sum up the conclusions of this investigation, the 
evidence seems clearly to point to the sex-instinct as 
part of the instinctive foundation of religion. It lends 
no support to the view that this is the whole of religion. 
This instinct seems particularly to be operative in the 
production of the peculiarly emotional religion of the 
adolescent, and in mystical religion. Essentially this is 
an example of sublimation. It is not merely a suppres¬ 
sion of an instinct followed by the utilisation of its 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 135 

energy for the ends of religion. It is rather that the 
sentiment of religion is built in part on the innate 
mental disposition called the sex-instinct, just as is the 
sentiment of human love. 

I dissent altogether from the view that this relation¬ 
ship is one which degrades religion. It is implicitly 
recognised by many of the mystics, to whom the love 
of God has seemed to be the end of those desires which 
they thought could find only imperfect satisfaction in 
human love. Thus, Coventry Patmore speaks of “that 
human love which is the precursor and explanation of 
and initiation into the divine.” 1 Dr G. Stanley Hall 
means it as no reproach to religion when he says: “True 
piety is earthly love transcendentalised, and the saint 
is the lover purified, refined, and perfected.” 2 

A last example of the recognition by a religious person 
of the relation between human and divine love may be 
taken from the pages of a Mohammedan poet. In his 
Yusuf u Zuleykha, Jami praises human love because it 
leads the soul to the divine love. He considers that the 
experience of human love must necessarily precede the 
knowledge of divine love; but he gives the warning 
(typical of all religion with a strong mystical trend) 
that the soul must not rest in human love, but must 
value it only because of the possibility of its sublimation 
to the religious end. 

Though in this world a hundred tasks thou tryest, 
’Tis love alone which from thyself will save thee. 
Even from earthly love thy face avert not, 

Since to the Real it may serve to raise thee. 

1 The Rod, The Root and the Flower, by Coventry Patmore, 
Magna Moralia, xlix. 

a The Psychology of Adolescence, by Professor G. Stanley Hall, 
II. p. 294. 


136 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


Ere A, B, C are rightly apprehended, 

How canst thou con the pages of thy Kur’an? 

A sage (so heard I), unto whom a student 
Came craving counsel on the path before him, 

Said, “If thy steps be strangers to love’s pathways, 
Depart, learn love, and then return before me! 

For, should’st thou fear to drink wine from Form’s 
flagon, 

Thou canst not drain the draught of the Ideal. 

But yet beware! Be not by Form belated; 

Strive rather with all speed the bridge to traverse. 

If to the bourn thou fain would’st bear thy baggage 
Upon the bridge let not thy footsteps linger.” 1 

Nothing has so far been said about the contribution 
of the psychoanalysts to this question. The theory of 
erotogenesis was not a growth from psychoanalysis. 
The best known contribution from this school has been 
Dr C. G. Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious. This 
is a work which deals mostly with the legends of early 
religions and makes only occasional and not very satis¬ 
factory mention of the higher religions. Its essential 
thesis is that religion is largely an expression of the 
tendency to regression to the attitude of infantile de¬ 
pendence on the parent, which is characteristic of an 
unsatisfactory development of the individual’s love- 
life. That this exists as an element in religion need not 
be doubted, but there seems to be no reason for sup¬ 
posing that it is the whole of religion. The infantile 
attitude comes out clearly in certain hymns, and in the 
writings of some of the mystics. As illustrations, we 
may take the attitude of dependence expressed in such 
hymns as the ones beginning “Safe in the arms of 

1 Translated by Professor E. G. Browne in A Year amongst the 
Persians , p. 128. 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 137 

Jesus,” and “I rest my soul on Jesus”; and in the follow¬ 
ing passage from Lady Julian: 

Fair and sweet is our Heavenly Mother in the sight of 
our souls; precious and lovely are the Gracious Chil¬ 
dren in the sight of our Heavenly Mother, . . . And I 
understood none higher stature in this life than Child¬ 
hood, in feebleness and failing of might and wit, unto 
the time that our Gracious Mother hath brought us 
up to our Father’s Bliss. 1 

It seems probable that the method of psychoanalysis 
will throw a great deal of light on the question both of 
the mental roots of the belief in God, and on the part 
played by religion in the stabilising of unbalanced per¬ 
sonalities, and in the building up of character. What is 
needed is a series of psychoanalyses of religious persons 
directed towards the elucidation of this problem. 2 I find 
it difficult to believe that results of any value can ever 
be obtained by psychoanalytic writing of the kind rep¬ 
resented by an article in the International Journal of 
Psychoanalysis for March, 1921, which claims to be a 
psychoanalytic study of the Christian Creed. The 
author takes phrases of the creed and states their psy¬ 
choanalytic meaning in the usual Freudian language. 
There is no indication that these meanings are based on 
any actual observations in analysis. The idea of God 
the Father is stated to be a father substitute adopted by 
the adolescent with a dominant (Edipus complex, who 
finds the actual father inadequate. “The ultimate 
causes of the Father symbol are the repressed parental 
complexes that are satisfied by this belief.” The predi- 

1 Revelations of Divine Love, by the Lady Julian, chap, lxiii. 

3 An account of pioneer work in this investigation is to be found 
in The Psychoanalytic Method, by Dr Oskar Pfister. (Eng. trans., 
London, 1915.) 


138 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

cate of Almighty results from the effort of the uncon¬ 
scious to recover the omnipotence of the babe in the 
womb. “The Virgin Mary,” we are told, “is an especially 
attractive object of worship because she satisfies an un¬ 
conscious longing of the infant boy to supplant the 
father or to think him away.” This path of easy dogma¬ 
tism and unsupported speculation is, of course, the ne¬ 
gation of scientific method, and it is surprising to find it 
as an offshoot of a system which claims to be the result 
of the application of a rigid determinism to psychology. 

While it seems likely that scientific psychoanalytic 
investigation will throw fight on many of the problems 
of the origin and growth of religious ideas, it seems im¬ 
probable that its discoveries will be of such a fundamen¬ 
tal character as many of its supporters are at present in¬ 
clined to believe. The assumption underlying the con¬ 
clusions of the psychoanalysts is that the fact which is 
reached last in a chain of free associations 1 from a given 
idea is the real cause of that idea. It has been pointed 
out by Dr Rivers 2 that this is not an assumption which 
we can admit without question. It is possible that the 
infantile sexuality insisted on by the Freudians is in 
some real sense an initial factor in religion as in all other 
human activities; but that this is not a fact of such 
importance that it dwarfs all the other factors in the 
building up of religion, and makes the question of the 
truth of its objects a trivial one. It is possible that the 
Freudians who insist that it is a factor of such impor¬ 
tance are in the position of botanists who, having dug 
round the roots of an oak tree, have discovered the 

1 Free association is the method adopted in psychoanalysis when 
the patient is asked to give all the thoughts which come into his 
mind, starting from a given situation or incident, without attempting 
in any way to control the course of his chain of thoughts. 

3 In a course of lectures not yet published. 


THE SEX-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 139 

remains of the acorn from which it grew, and insist that 
in this and this alone lies all the significance of the oak; 
and that the other scientists who spend their lives in 
the investigation of the structure of the tree itself, the 
artists who rejoice in its beauty, and the carpenters who 
use its wood, are all alike living in a fool’s paradise, 
because they have not realised that the oak is a decayed 
acorn and nothing more. 


CHAPTER XI 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 

In the ninth chapter we discussed the gregarious or 
herd-instinct, which determines the behaviour and feel¬ 
ings of individuals of a gregarious species of animals in 
their relations with other individuals of the same spe¬ 
cies. If we admit that man is a gregarious animal, we 
are led to look to the herd-instinct as the biological ex¬ 
planation of his behaviour in his social organisations in 
the widest sense—when he forms a society, or assembles 
in a crowd, or when he behaves as a well-regulated mem¬ 
ber of a previously existing society. We regard herd- 
suggestion as the mental concomitant of the herd- 
instinct. The general obedience of the individual to the 
will of his society in courses of action, his sympathetic 
response to the emotions of his society, and his defer¬ 
ence to its opinions, are all results of the operation of 
herd-suggestion. They are necessary means of securing 
conformity in action of all individuals of the same group 
so that the ends of the herd-instinct may be attained. 

A well-known and imaginative work of popular 
science 1 discusses the influence of the herd-instinct on 
human behaviour. Apparently the author considers 
that the herd-instinct is the principal root of religious 
belief, for he says: 

This intimate dependence on the herd is traceable 
not merely in matters physical and intellectual, but 

1 Instincts oj the Herd in Peace and War, by Mr W. Trotter. 
(London, 1916.) 


140 



THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 141 


also betrays itself in the deepest recesses of person¬ 
ality as a sense of incompleteness which compels the 
individual to reach out towards some larger existence 
than his own, some encompassing being in whom his 
perplexities may find a solution and his longings peace. 
Physical loneliness and intellectual isolation are 
effectually solaced by the nearness and agreement of 
the herd. The deeper personal necessities cannot be 
met—at any rate, in such society as has been so far 
evolved—by so superficial a union. . . . Religious 
feeling is therefore a character inherent in the very 
structure of the human mind, and is the expression 
of a need which must be recognised by the biologist 
as neither superficial nor transitory . 1 

We need not suppose that the unsatisfied longings of 
the herd-instinct make up the whole of the biological 
foundation of religious feeling (or, indeed, the principal 
part of it) in order to appreciate the importance of the 
point of view of this paragraph. Perhaps the essential 
difference between the part played by the herd-instinct 
and by the sex-instinct in the production of religious 
emotion, lies in the fact that the former is not subject to 
such necessary repression under the conditions of mod¬ 
ern life as is the latter. A psychoanalytic investigation 
of the mental roots of the religion of Robinson Crusoe 
might have shown that the unsatisfied longings of the 
herd-instinct resulting from his complete loneliness 
played a very considerable part in its formation. This, 
however, is mere speculation; such conditions are too 
rare for investigation. What is certain is that the sup¬ 
pression of the normal mode of satisfaction of the herd- 
instinct is a preliminary condition of the more intensive 


1 Op. cit. p. 113. 


142 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

religious life. Solitude is sought in the monastic cell; 
the esteem of one’s fellow-men is despised. 

To go abroad but now and then, To shun publicity, 
—Ay, even not to wish to see the face of man, All 
this is to be praised in one who takes the vows. . . . 
Go in and bar your door And call upon your loved 
one, “Jesus come to me.” Stay in your cell with Him; 
Elsewhere you will not find such rest . 1 

This renunciation of the pleasures of human society 
and of society’s approval is seen in an extreme form in 
the lives of the Egyptian Fathers, who would behave 
grotesquely in public lest they should earn a reputation 
for being holy men and so end by recovering the esteem 
which they began by renouncing. 

One of the results of the possession by man of the 
instincts of a gregarious animal is the fact that he tends 
to form more or less permanent groups, and that in such 
groups his behaviour and his emotional reactions are 
entirely different from those of his solitary life. This 
influence of his social environment on the mind of an 
individual man makes it possible for the purpose of 
study to consider the group as a unit. It is not neces¬ 
sary to postulate any collective consciousness for a social 
group, and any such assumption is unnecessary and un¬ 
scientific. The term the group mind has been used by 
Dr McDougall 2 in a way which does not assume the 
existence of any hypothetical group consciousness, and 
in McDougall’s sense it may be found to be a useful one 
for social psychology. There are two directions from 
which the problems of religion have been approached 
by writers who make fundamental to their thought, the 

1 The Imitation oj Christ, by St Thomas a Kempis. 

3 The Group Mind. (London, 1920.) Introduction. 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 143 

unity of the social group. The first of these is that of the 
French sociologists, who collaborate in the production 
of VAnnee Sociologique, the second is that of the writers 
on the somewhat nebulous crowd psychology, which 
has been made popular by Le Bon. 

We will consider first the point of view of sociology. 
This differs from the point of view of psychology in the 
fact that in sociology, groups of human beings and not 
individuals are the units whose laws we endeavour to 
trace out. We may (if we wish) speak of a group mind, 
a general will and collective ideas, thus taking over into 
sociology the words of psychology with their meanings 
changed. We may disagree about the desirability of 
such a taking over of terms, but the question is not one 
of the first importance. What is important is that we 
should recognise clearly that their meaning has been 
changed, that if we choose to talk about a group mind 
we have no right to assume that there is in group 
activity anything of the same nature as the individual 
consciousness which accompanies the working of the 
mind of psychology. 

The relationship between psychology and sociology 
appears to be the same as that between molecular 
physics and mechanics. In molecular physics, single 
molecules are considered as separate things and the laws 
of their interaction are the objects of study. In me¬ 
chanics, masses of matter are considered without any 
reference to the molecules of which they are composed 
—malleability, for example, is treated as a property of 
matter in mass without any consideration of its ulti¬ 
mate dependence on the mutual attractions of the con¬ 
stituent molecules. In the same way, it is found in 
sociology that groups of men interact with sufficient uni¬ 
formity for it to be possible to develop laws of their in- 


144 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

teraction without any reference to the fact that these 
are ultimately determined by the passions and struggles 
of individual men. The danger which threatens the sci¬ 
ence of sociology is that it should forget this ultimate 
dependence of its data on the facts of individual psy¬ 
chology. It is ultimately on the laws of the interaction 
of individuals (on the operation of the herd-instinct in 
suggestion, etc., on the antagonistic action of the in¬ 
stinct of self-preservation, and so on) that the behaviour 
of groups of men is dependent. It may be found more 
convenient to express facts connected with societies in 
terms of the conceptions of sociology, but it must be re¬ 
membered that there is no social fact which is not 
(theoretically at least) expressible in terms of indi¬ 
vidual psychology. 

This method of treating religion has been adopted by 
Durkheim and his collaborators in VAnnee Sociologique. 
The characteristics of their treatment and its limitations 
are alike determined by the fact that they look for 
religion amongst “les faits sociaux.” 1 Their refusal to 
admit the legitimacy of any other method of approach 
than the sociological is absolute, as may be seen by the 
following extract from an article by M. Durkheim, en¬ 
titled “De la Definition des Phenomenes Religieux”: 

. . . ce n’est pas dans la nature humaine en general 
qu’il faut aller chercher la cause determinante des 
phenomes religieux; c’est dans la nature des 
societes auxquelles ils se rapportent, et s’ils ont evolue 
au cours de Fhistoire, c’est que Torganisation sociale 
elle-meme s’est transformee. Du coup, les theories 
traditionnelles qui croirent decouvrir la source de la 
religiosity dans des sentiments prives, comme la crainte 

1 L’Annee Sociologique, n. p. 2. 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 145 

reverentielle qu’inspiraient a chacun de nous soit le 
jeu des grandes forces cosmiques soit le spectacle de 
certains phenomenes naturels comme la mort, doivent 
nous devenir plus que suspectes. On peut des mainte- 
nant prejuger avec quelque assurance que les 
recherches doivent etre conduites dans un tout autre 
esprit. Le probleme se pose en termes sociologiques. 
Les forces devant lesquelles s’incline le croyant ne sont 
pas des simples energies physiques, telles qu’elles sont 
donnees au sens et a Timagination; ce sont des forces 
sociales. Elies sont le produit direct de sentiments 
collectifs qui ont ete amenes a prendre un revetement 
materiel . 1 

The introduction of a single word would make this 
passage unobjectionable. If M. Durkheim were content 
to say that theories which try to account for religion 
merely by appealing to individual feelings such as rev- 
erential fear must be more than suspect, most people 
would be willing to agree with him. But he goes further 
than this and would have us believe that the forces 
which produce religion are merely social, an opinion 
which ignores the complexities of the question as com¬ 
pletely as the one he is engaged in refuting. 

The practical drawbacks of the limitations of this 
method of treatment may be illustrated by a review of 
The Varieties of Religious Experience, by M. Mauss: 

Deja M. J. nous concede que la plus grande partie de 
hhumanite n’a pas eu de ces veritables experiences reli- 
gieuses, et que la majorite des fideles de toutes les 
religions vivent sur le fonds traditionnel. ... La vie 
religieuse du commun des mortels n’est que de “seconde 
main.” 2 

1 L’Annee Sociologique, n. p. 24. 

2 Ibid. vii. p. 205. 


146 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


This amounts to the statement that the only element 
which plays a part in the building up of the normal 
religious belief is what we have described as the tradi¬ 
tional element. This is a pure assumption which has no 
better support in fact than its necessity in order to 
render possible the treatment of religion as only “un 
fait social.” All the evidence which has already been 
brought forward to show the dependence of normal (and 
not only mystical) religion on experience of various 
kinds, and the proved weakness of religion in which the 
traditional element alone is developed, refute this re¬ 
duction of religion solely to this one element. A circum¬ 
stance which leads us to distrust any generalisation 
which starts by the assertion that religion is merely the 
product of one of the constituent elements we supposed 
it to have been made up of, is the fact that other schools 
of investigators tell us with equal conviction that re¬ 
ligion is merely the result of one of the other elements. 
For example, we may compare the assertion of the 
French sociologists that religion is merely the product 
of social forces and their complete denial of the theories 
which trace it to individual subjective experiences, with 
the theory of the erotogenesists who say that it is alto¬ 
gether the product of the misinterpretation of an 
individual subjective experience. 

The French sociologists consider that the ideas of 
religion belong to the class of collective ideas, products 
of pre-logical group thinking. This pre-logical or 
mystical thinking is supposed by them to have been the 
normal mental process of primitive man, and to have 
continued to develop side by side with the logical think¬ 
ing which acknowledges the supremacy of the law of 
contradiction. While logical processes of thinking have, 
on the whole, ousted the rival method, M. Levy Bruhl 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 147 

states that it continues to lurk in the congenial gloom 
of the sanctuary and the law court. A collective repre¬ 
sentation is what is imagined by many members of a 
group, each under the influence of the rest; it represents 
things to be, not as they are, but as for certain social 
purposes one would wish them to be. 

It has already been pointed out that some of the proc¬ 
esses of religious thinking show an alogical and infantile 
character. This infantile character is shown by the de¬ 
pendence on symbolism and the difficulty of translating 
religious ideas into the exact language of directed think¬ 
ing. This was considered to show the unconscious roots 
of some religious ideas in the infantile psyche. The 
French sociologists attribute this same character of in¬ 
fantility to the fact that religious ideas are the product 
of collective thought. It does not seem to be necessary 
to decide between these alternative theories as if they 
were mutually exclusive explanations. Both collective 
thinking and the products of the activity of the un¬ 
conscious mind show this character, which marks their 
relationship with primitive ways of thinking. Since we 
have every reason to suppose that both collective think¬ 
ing and individual unconscious thinking have played a 
part in building up religious belief, it would be idle to 
dispute about whether it owes its alogical element to 
one or other of these causes. We may notice in passing 
that it is this infantilism which they possess in common 
that is at the root of the relationship between myths 
and dreams, about which a considerable psychoanalytic 
literature has grown up. 

While acknowledging the value of the researches of 
the writers in L’Annee Sociologique, I see no reason for 
accepting their view that the sociological point of view 
possesses any kind of ultimate finality which makes the 



148 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

psychological method of approach impossible. On the 
contrary, this view seems to be based on a fallacious as¬ 
sumption—the assumption that the only psychological 
forces which are at work in the production of religious 
ideas are social forces. There seems, on the other hand, 
to be abundant evidence to show that the explanation 
of religious ideas must lie partly in their value for the 
experience of individuals in each succeeding generation 
which has accepted them, and in part on their capacity 
for being translated into the exact language of logical 
thinking—in other words, on their experiential and 
rational grounding as well as on their traditional 
grounding. 1 

The best known book dealing with crowd psychology 
is The Crowd, by M. Le Bon. This is a curiously un¬ 
scientific work, which combines interesting and valuable 
observations with a fanciful background of psycho- 
physiological theory and a slipshod method which 
allows the author’s political and other prejudices to 
colour all his observations. This work has, however, 
been so widely read and so slavishly reproduced by 
writers on the present and allied subjects that it is neces¬ 
sary to mention it here, since most people who have 
thought about the subject at all will have had their 
ways of thinking about it to some extent formed by 
Le Bon’s writings. 

By a crowd, for the purposes of his study, M. Le Bon 
means a group of persons united together by some com¬ 
mon purpose or interest, such as a political meeting or a 
lynching party. The characteristics which he distin¬ 
guishes in them are their cruelty and lack of responsi- 

*For a more adequate discussion of the views here mentioned, 
the reader is referred to Group Theories oj Religion and the Indi¬ 
vidual, by Professor C. C. J. Webb. 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 149 

bility, their ready response to an emotional and their 
slight response to an intellectual appeal, and their high 
suggestibility. The high suggestibility of a crowd is 
shown by its rapid and vigorous response to oratory 
which would leave its members cold if it were addressed 
to them as individuals. This results from the fact that 
each of the individual members is being acted upon by 
herd-suggestion (produced by all the other members 
who are also being influenced by the orator) and not 
merely by the suggestions of the orator himself. For 
this reason, it is common in some forms of religious ser¬ 
vice for the conductor to make the congregation all per¬ 
form some conspicuous action which testifies to their 
agreement with what is going on. The Salvationists 
ejaculate hallelujah during their addresses or clap out 
the verses of a hymn; the members of a Catholic con¬ 
gregation cross themselves or perform other ritual acts 
at definite times. Even if an audience can be made to 
laugh during an address, this is a method of putting into 
operation the force of herd-suggestion. M. Le Bon says, 
somewhat cynically, that a crowd should always be ap¬ 
pealed to through their emotions and never through 
their reason, and that two things only are necessary in 
mob oratory—affirmation and repetition. Affirmation 
in a confident manner and repetition is, of course, the 
formula for successful suggestion. 

With no touch of M. Le Bon’s cynicism, a writer on 
the preaching needed in revivals 1 gives almost identical 
advice: 

Revival preaching to be effective must be positive. 
The doubter never has revivals. ... A revival is a 

1 How to promote and conduct a successjul Revival, by R. A. 
Torrey, p. 32. 


150 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

revolution in many important respects, and revolutions 
are never brought about by timid, fearful or depreca¬ 
tory addresses. They are awakened by men who are 
cocksure of their ground, and who speak with au¬ 
thority. . . . Revival preaching must be directed to¬ 
wards the heart and not the head. . . . Get hold of 
the heart and the head yields easily. 

It would be difficult to find a better example of 
affirmation and repetition than the following extract 
from an address given by Spurgeon to open-air 
preachers, printed in the same book as the above. The 
suggestion which is being repeated is that they should 
go on with their preaching. Notice particularly the 
method which is adopted. There is no development of 
the thought and no argument about it. It is simply 
repeated unchanged or by allusion: 

Go on with your preaching. Cobbler, stick to your 
last; preacher, stick to your preaching. In the great 
day, when the muster roll shall be read, of all those 
who are converted through fine music, and church 
decoration, and religious exhibitions and entertain¬ 
ments, they will amount to the tenth part of nothing ; 
but it will always please God by the foolishness of 
preaching to save them that believe. Keep to your 
preaching; and if you do anything beside, do not let 
it throw your preaching into the background. In the 
first place preach and in the second place preach and 
in the third place preach. 

Believe in preaching the love of Christ, believe in 
preaching the atoning sacrifice, believe in preaching 
the new birth, believe in preaching the whole counsel 
of God. The old hammer of the Gospel will still 
break the rock in pieces; the ancient fire of Pentecost 
will still burn among the multitude. Try nothing 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 151 

new, but go on with preaching, and if we all preach 
with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, the re¬ 
sults of preaching will astound us. Why, there is no 
end, after all, to the power of the tongue! Look at 
the power of a bad tongue, what great mischief it can 
do; and shall not God put more power into a good 
tongue, if we will but use it aright? Look at the 
power of fire, a single spark might give a city to the 
flames; even so, the Spirit of God being with us, we 
need not calculate how much, or what we can do: 
there is no calculating the potentialities of a flame, and 
there is no end to the possibilities of divine truth 
spoken with the enthusiasm which is born of the Spirit 
of God. . . . Go on! go on! go on! In God’s name 
go on! for if the preaching of the Gospel does not save 
men, nothing will . 1 

Either directly or by some sort of allusion, the same 
suggestion has been repeated no less than thirty-one 
times in the course of thirteen sentences. When we read 
the passage, this repetition seems a barren oratorical 
trick, and the reading of it leaves us cold. But we must 
not forget the influence which such oratory had on its 
hearers when its suggestive effect was reinforced by the 
fervid confidence of delivery produced by Spurgeon’s 
faith in the message he was delivering, and by the 
prestige which his reputation attached to him. 

We may notice here that successful speaking of this 
kind depends in part on the power of the speaker to 
receive suggestions from his audience. A high degree of 
suggestibility is one of the conditions of successful 
oratory. The speaker is continually feeling the temper 
of his audience and the success with which his sugges¬ 
tions are being received. He varies his method of pres- 

1 Op. cit. pp. 221 and 222. 


152 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

entation as he perceives the varying responses of his 
audience. If he said something at the beginning repug¬ 
nant to them, he would arouse a general attitude of 
contra-suggestion and his address would fail. But after 
he has habituated his audience to receiving suggestions 
from him, he may be able to say later the unwelcome 
thing and find that it is accepted without any difficulty. 
This attitude of being in affective touch with their audi¬ 
ences will be found to be adopted more or less con¬ 
sciously by most (perhaps all) successful speakers. De¬ 
scriptions of their methods will be found to contain some 
such fact as the following, which is taken from an ac¬ 
count of Evan Roberts, the Welsh revivalist: 

He makes the audience reveal itself, and then tells 
the people what they know already. 1 

It is this fact which makes a carefully prepared 
speech of so little value as compared with a less elo¬ 
quent discourse in which the speaker is ceaselessly vary¬ 
ing his language in response to the changing emotions 
which he feels that he is producing in his audience. 

We will now turn to the consideration of the more 
violent and crude methods of suggestion employed in 
some kinds of revival. Nowhere in the world have these 
been developed in such an extraordinary way as in 
America. An extreme example may be found in the 
method of preaching adopted by the successful evangel¬ 
ist and ex-prize-fighter, Billy Sunday. This is taken 
from a local paper of Illinois: 

5843 converts, 683 in a day. Total gift to Mr Sun¬ 
day, $10,431. Greatest revival in history. Will attract 
the attention of the religious world. Sermon on 

1 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. xix. p. 80. 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 153 

“Booze,” the greatest effort of the revival! These are 
all headlines to the report. . . . The preacher . . . 
began with his coat, vest, tie and collar off. In a few 
moments his shirt and undershirt were gaping open 
to the waist, and the muscles of his neck and chest 
were seen working like those in the arm of a black¬ 
smith, while perspiration poured from every pore. His 
clothing was soaked, as if a hose had been turned on 
him. He strained, and twisted, and reached up and 
down. Once he was on the floor for just a second, in 
the attitude of crawling, to show that all slime crawled 
out of the saloon; then he was on his feet as quickly 
as a cat could jump. At the end of forty-five minutes 
he mounted a chair, reached high, as he shouted, then 
again was on the floor, and dropped prostrate to illus¬ 
trate a story of a drunken man, bounded to his feet 
again as if steel springs filled that lithe, slender, light¬ 
ning-like body. He generally breaks a common kitchen 
chair in this sermon, and this came after a terrible 
effort, with eyes flashing, face scowling, the picture of 
hate. He whirled the chair over his head, smashed the 
chair to the platform floor, whirled the shattered wreck 
in the air again, and threw it to the ground in front of 
the pulpit. In two minutes men from the front row 
were tearing the wreck to pieces and dividing it up. 
. . . Later, men carried away in cheering could be seen 
in the audience waving those chair fragments in the 
air . 1 

The appeal to fear by vivid descriptions of hell-fire 
was very common in such revivals. Billy Sunday him¬ 
self is reported to have been generous in his references 
to brimstone. The following is an extract from a sermon 
by.Jonathan Edwards, who preached in America in the 
early part of the eighteenth century: 

1 Quoted by Mr Cohen in his Religion and Sex, p. 172. 


154 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

We can conceive but little of the matter; but to help 
your conception, imagine yourselves to be cast into a 
fiery oven, or a great furnace, where your pain would 
be as much greater than that occasioned by acciden¬ 
tally touching a coal of fire as the heat is greater. 
Imagine also that your body were to lie there for a 
quarter of an hour, full of fire and all the while full 
of quick sense. What horror would you feel at the 
entrance of such a furnace. How long would that 
quarter of an hour seem to you? And after you had 
endured it for one minute, how overpowering would 
it be to you to think that you had to endure it for 
the other fourteen. But what would be the effect 
upon your soul if you must lie there enduring that 
torment for twenty-four hours. And how much greater 
would be the effect, if you knew you must endure it for 
a whole year. And how vastly greater still, if you 
knew you must endure it for a thousand years. Oh! 
then how would your heart sink if you knew that you 
must bear it for ever and ever—that there would 
be no end, that for millions and millions of ages, your 
torments would be no nearer to an end and that you 
never, never would be delivered. But your torments 
in hell will be immensely greater than this illustration 
represents. 1 

The terror which gripped his audiences made them 
ciy aloud for mercy so that the preacher sometimes 
could not be heard, and they grasped their benches to 
prevent themselves from slipping into the pit. Oratory 
of this kind is not common at the present time, but the 
following extract from a sermon preached by an evan¬ 
gelist in New York so recently as 1907, is not very 
different in spirit from those of Jonathan Edwards: 

1 Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals. Davenport (New York, 
1906), pp. 112, 113. 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 155 

I preach hell because God puts His special blessing 
on it, convicting sinners and sanctifying believers, 
arousing the Church to greater effort for the salvation 
of the perishing. . . . Hell has been running for six 
thousand years. It is filling up every day. Where is it? 
About eighteen miles from here. Which way is it? 
Straight down —not over eighteen miles, down in the 
bowels of the earth. 1 

The intense emotional excitement of the revival tends 
to be accompanied by abnormal effects which closely 
resemble the convulsive attacks of hysteria. These are 
extremely contagious and whole multitudes have been 
known to fall down, to jerk their bodies in extraordinary 
contortions, to bark, to laugh and to dance. Sceptics 
even were not free from the contagion, if they were 
present at the meetings. As an example of these phe¬ 
nomena, we may take the following account of a great 
revival in Kentucky in 1801. This was at a camp-meet¬ 
ing of nearly twenty thousand persons which went on 
for several days: 

The whole body of persons who actually fell helpless 
to the earth during the progress of the meeting was 
computed ... to be three thousand persons, about 
one in every six. . . . “At no time was the floor less 
than half covered. Some lay quiet, unable to move 
or speak. Some talked, but could not move. Some 
beat the floor with their heels. Some, shrieking in 
agony, bounded about like a live fish out of water. 
Many lay down and rolled over and over for hours 
at a time. Others rushed wildly over the stumps and 
benches, and then plunged, shouting, ‘Lost! Lost!’ into 
the forest.’' . . . Next to the “falling” exercise the most 

1 The Religious Consciousness. Professor J. B. Pratt (New York, 
1920), p. 178. 


156 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


notable and characteristic Kentucky phenomenon was 
the “jerks.” The unhappy victim shook in every joint. 
Sometimes the head was thrown from side to side with 
great rapidity. Again the feet were affected, and the 
subject would hop like a frog. Often the body would 
be thrown violently to the ground, where it would 
continue to bound from one place to another. Peter 
Cartwright declares that he has seen more than five 
hundred persons jerking at once in the congregation. 
. . . Another phenomenon not so common was the 
“barking” exercise. The votaries of this dignified rite 
gathered in groups on all fours, like dogs, growling and 
snapping their teeth at the foot of a tree as the min¬ 
ister preached,—a practice which they designated as 
“treeing the devil”! . . . Many of these camp-meeting 
folk lay insensible, sometimes for hours, but when 
they recovered from the swoon it was to relate, in 
what were called “strains of heaven,” experiences of 
interviews with departed friends and visions of glory . 1 

Another abnormal manifestation of revival meetings 
is glossolalia or the speaking with tongues. This name is 
generally applied to a stream of meaningless syllables, 
sometimes mixed with a few real words, poured out 
under the influence of intense emotion. The interpreta¬ 
tion by bystanders is due to the gestures and emotional 
expression by which the sounds are accompanied. 

There were also very grave charges at the Kentucky 
camp-meetings of serious immorality. Like the other 
phenomena which have been described, this charge 
could be paralleled in other revivals. There is less rea¬ 
son to doubt it since the charge was made, not by the 
ungodly, but by ministers taking part in the revival. 

Similar phenomena can be found recorded in the his- 

1 Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, Davenport, pp. 77-80. 


THE HERD-INSTINCT AND RELIGION 157 

lory of English revivals, though in less number and with 
less intensity. Wesley did not employ the fear of hell 
with such freedom as Jonathan Edwards, but there are 
records of sermons by him with a considerable element 
of hell-fire. Two of his disciples succeeded, near Cam¬ 
bridge, in producing such morbid effects of terror by 
their preaching, that the account of it in Wesley’s diary 
seems more like the history of a terrible outbreak of in¬ 
sanity than a condition deliberately produced in honour 
of God. Evan Roberts, the Welsh revivalist, did not use 
fear as a motive in his missions, but he had jerks and 
dancing amongst his congregation. I notice that Spur¬ 
geon regarded all such things as the work of the devil. 

Before leaving the subject of revivals, we may men¬ 
tion one question which a student of the subject can 
hardly fail to ask himself. We find in the revival a re¬ 
markably uniform succession of events which becomes 
so conventional in its form that one might describe it 
as a religious rite. In its conventional form it appears 
at first to be entirely confined to Protestant Chris¬ 
tianity. We are led to enquire whether it is really a 
spontaneous growth in Protestant Christianity, or 
whether it is a phenomenon to be met elsewhere in the 
history of religions. The answer to this question is sup¬ 
plied by Davenport in the work from which quotations 
have already been given. He shows that the revivals of 
the Kentucky camp-meetings are very much like the 
methods of two Red Indian religious movements . 1 
These are the Shaker religion of the Indians of Puget 
Sound and the ghost-dance religion. In these, as in the 
Kentucky camp-meetings, cataleptic and convulsive 
phenomena were produced by mass suggestion in which 

1 These are described in the fourteenth annual report of the 
Bureau of Ethnology. 


158 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

the medicine-men played the part of the camp-meeting 
preachers. Communion with the spirit-world was en¬ 
joyed during trances and even those unsympathetic to 
the movement were unable to prevent themselves from 
being overwhelmed by its influence. As in the camp- 
meetings, these morbid phenomena were accompanied 
by real moral advance and the Indians who were 
affected by them made vigorous onslaughts on their 
racial vices of drinking and gambling. 

Although, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, 
suggestion is a perfectly legitimate weapon for religion, 
and although even emotional violence may be used to 
produce desirable changes in peoples’ hearts, it should 
be clear that the methods we have been describing have 
great dangers. The jerks and other morbid symptoms, 
even when they are only temporary, are undesirable. 
But they may also, although perhaps rarely, end in 
permanent insanity. The weakening of moral control 
tends, as has been mentioned, to result in immorality. 
In addition to this there is a danger of revivals losing 
their beneficial effect on conduct, and becoming a kind 
of emotional debauch which is indulged in repeatedly. 
On the other side of the account we must put a large 
number of changes of life, which have been real changes 
for the better, and have resulted from emotional 
revivals. 


CHAPTER XII 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 

In making a distinction between worship and prayer, 
I propose to confine the word worship to the collective 
activity corresponding to the private and individual 
activity of prayer. In worship, in its simplest form, we 
have a group of persons trying as a group to get into 
relationship with God. Here we find at work all those 
very powerful influences which we have seen to be de¬ 
pendent on the gregarious instincts. For this reason, 
worship may be felt to be valuable even when group 
sentiment is not very strong, for the individual finds 
that he can better feel himself in relationship with God 
when he seeks Him in company with others. The con¬ 
tagion of feeling resulting from herd-suggestion gives 
him a depth of emotional experience which the ordinary 
man does not attain in his own private devotions. In 
the solemnity of church services he experiences a sense 
of the divine presence compared with which the affec¬ 
tive content of his private prayer is poor. 

In The Religious Consciousness, Pratt distinguishes 
two types of worship which he calls the objective and 
the subjective. In objective worship, the leading idea 
is to have in some way an effect on God or to communi¬ 
cate with Him; while in subjective worship, the aim is 
to have some sort of effect on the minds of the wor¬ 
shippers. He takes as examples in Christianity the 
ideals of Catholicism and Protestantism, and says that 

159 


160 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

the leading purpose of the Mass is the worship of God, 
while that of the Protestant service is its subjective 
effect on the minds and hearts of the worshippers. He 
finds the same distinction between the objective popular 
worship in Indian temples, and the more sophisticated 
Arya Samaj; while one may also find in India the most 
extreme forms of subjective worship (at least in theory) 
in Jainism and Buddhism. 

I intend to accept this distinction between subject¬ 
ive and objective worship for the purpose of discussing 
what Pratt calls the problem of worship. At the same 
time, it is necessary to point out that his application of 
the distinction in practice appears to be a completely 
unwarranted simplification of the facts. We may agree 
that the principal object of the Mass is the worship of 
God, but there seems to be no sufficient reason for 
supposing that it is different in most of the services of 
Protestants. Where we find Protestant services, whose 
main purpose seems to be the subjective effect on the 
minds and hearts of the worshippers, this is essentially 
a changed ideal for a service which had as its original 
intention the worship of God as definitely as has the 
Mass. The sharp distinction made by Professor Pratt 
between the objective worship of Catholicism and the 
subjective worship of Protestantism, seems to be an 
example of the tendency (deep-rooted in the human 
mind) to make a clear and striking exposition by draw¬ 
ing in black and white what can only be represented 
truthfully by the use of various shades of grey. 

The practical problem of religious worship arises from 
the fact that the subjective effect of objective methods 
of worship, although not aimed at directly, is found to 
be great; but, at the same time, these methods are 
ineffective if not accompanied by the belief in their 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 161 

objective value. Pratt says that so excellent in pro¬ 
ducing subjective effects are the objective methods of 
the Catholic Church that a benevolent atheist might 
conceivably do his best to forward the interests of 
Catholicism. If he were a wise as well as a benevolent 
atheist, however, he would probably keep his views of 
the truly subjective nature of the worship entirely to 
himself. Otherwise, the desired result might become 
almost unattainable. This Pratt diagnoses as the weak¬ 
ness of objective worship, that it is impossible to those 
whose minds are of too rationalistic a cast to be able to 
accept the beliefs behind it. He sums up the difficulty 
by saying that if objective worship be impossible for the 
intelligent, and if subjective without objective worship 
is self-delusion, there is an end of all worship for the 
modern man. The second statement he thinks is cer¬ 
tainly true, but the first he considers is probably fake. 
With the reasons for considering that objective worship 
is still possible for the intelligent modern man, I will 
not here deal, since this is the kind of problem I am 
reserving for the last chapter. 

Prayer, like worship, is certainly always in its first 
intention objective. In ordinary speech we would refuse 
to use the word prayer of any vocal activity undertaken 
primarily for its good effects on the mind of the person 
using it. Essentially it is directed towards a super¬ 
human being in the belief that it is heard by the being to 
whom it is addressed. But this activity has subjective 
effects as well, and as psychologists we are primarily in¬ 
terested in these. Such subjective effects as are pro¬ 
duced by prayer are plainly related to the effects of 
autosuggestion in secular life. In fact, if a vocal activity 
resembling prayer were undertaken purely for the sake 
of its effects on the mind of the person using it, this 


162 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

activity would be pure autosuggestion. Prayer differs 
from such simple autosuggestion in the fact that its 
mental effects are only incidental and are not what is 
primarily intended. It is necessary, however, in order 
to approach the consideration of the mental effects of 
prayer, to discuss autosuggestion at some length. 

This task is made easier for us by the extraordinary 
command of popular interest which has been achieved 
by the new Nancy school of autosuggestion, described 
by Professor Baudouin in his Suggestion et Autosugges¬ 
tion. It is not true, of course, that autosuggestion is 
a discovery of Dr Coue, as writers in the lay press ap¬ 
pear to believe. Schools of autosuggestion have existed 
both in this country and in America, of which the New 
Thought movement is a prominent example. The new 
Nancy movement will, however, be a convenient one to 
take as the subject of an exposition of autosuggestion, 
partly because it is so w T ell known, partly because it 
systematises and makes explicit important details of 
practice which are neglected by other systems. 

Autosuggestion, in all its forms, is the same process 
as heterosuggestion (or suggestion by another person) 
but put into action by the person himself and not by 
another person. As in ordinary suggestion, the thought 
of a belief or a course of action becomes realised by the 
subject, i.e. translated into an actually held belief, or an 
actual course of action. Baudouin distinguishes between 
spontaneous autosuggestions, in which the matter of the 
suggestions has caught the attention of the subject and 
been realised by him spontaneously, i.e. without his own 
deliberate co-operation, and reflective autosuggestions 
in which the same process is made to take place inten¬ 
tionally. 

Spontaneous autosuggestion is a process which ap- 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 163 

pears to be taking place fairly commonly, whenever an 
idea which has happened to catch our attention realises 
itself. An opinion, for example, which we have often 
heard repeated tends to become a firmly held belief. 
When we see a fire freshly lighted, we may begin to feel 
warmer, although it is not yet really giving out an ap¬ 
preciable amount of heat. An illness that we are always 
talking and thinking about tends to develop. There are 
two fairly obvious conditions which an idea must fulfil 
before it can become a spontaneous autosuggestion. 
The first is that it shall have caught the attention, the 
second that it shall be enveloped in some more or less 
powerful affect. The new Nancy school also emphasises 
a third condition for any autosuggestion, that it shall 
be held in attention by conscious effort. This is consid¬ 
ered by Baudouin to be the important contribution of 
Nancy to the psychology of autosuggestion and is called 
by him the Lam of Reversed Effort. This is stated by 
him as follows: 

When an idea imposes itself on the mind to such an 
extent as to give rise to a suggestion, all the conscious 
efforts which the subject makes in order to counteract 
this suggestion are not merely without the desired 
effect, but they actually run counter to the subject’s 
conscious wishes and tend to intensify the suggestion . 1 

These conditions may be illustrated by an example 
given in an earlier chapter—the impossibility of walk¬ 
ing along a high plank with a sheer drop on both sides 
without falling off, although the plank may be of such a 
width that it would be perfectly easy to walk along it 
if it were lying on the floor. Spontaneous attention is 

1 Suggestion and Autosuggestion, by Professor Baudouin (Eng. 
trans.), p. 116. 


164 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


unavoidably caught by the idea of falling off, and there 
is a very powerful emotional accompaniment (of fear or 
horror) to this idea. These are the first two conditions 
which have been mentioned as those under which ideas 
tend to become realised by spontaneous autosuggestion. 
If the person concerned could manage either not to think 
about falling off at all, or to think about it without any 
strong emotion, his danger of falling off would be less. 
The law of reversed effort may be illustrated by the 
observation of the fact that his voluntary efforts to 
retain his balance are not only useless but tend to defeat 
that end. 

Reflective autosuggestion has as its objects the com¬ 
bating of noxious spontaneous autosuggestions, and the 
deliberate attainment of the good mental effects acci¬ 
dentally produced by desirable spontaneous autosugges¬ 
tions. The difficulty in the practice of reflective 
autosuggestion is to find an efficient substitute for spon¬ 
taneous attention. A voluntary effort to think of and 
to realise the object of the desired suggestion is found 
not to be successful, and this failure is accounted for by 
the law of reversed effort. It is for this reason that most 
people fail when they try to follow the directions of one 
of the systems of autosuggestion. They are told to con¬ 
centrate on an idea. For them concentration means an 
intense voluntary effort to think of it; and intense vol¬ 
untary effort is the condition under which autosugges¬ 
tion is most certain to fail. Those who have experienced 
the effects of intense voluntary effort to go to sleep know 
the condition of hopeless wakefulness which such an 
effort induces. The practical problem to make success¬ 
ful reflective autosuggestion possible is to discover some 
condition in which voluntary effort is as small as pos¬ 
sible, but in which the mind can be kept occupied with 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 165 

the particular thought which is to be the object of the 
suggestion. 

I propose to discuss the states of mind which Profes¬ 
sor Baudouin distinguishes at this stage of his work, in 
order to point out their relationship to mental states 
found in Christian prayer and in the mental self-culture 
of Yoga. The condition between sleeping and waking, 
which has already been noticed as one of high suggesti¬ 
bility, is a state in which spontaneous autosuggestions 
are stated to be particularly liable to realise themselves. 
All writers on autosuggestion seem to be aiming at the 
willed production of a similar state in which there is a 
certain emptiness of mind and suspension of the mental 
functions. Sometimes, however, they write as if this 
were a state to be attained by an act of will, and their 
followers find themselves misled into making strenuous 
efforts where a relaxation of effort is the principal neces- 
sity. 

One of the characteristics of this half-waking condi¬ 
tion is what Baudouin calls the outcropping of the sub¬ 
conscious. The mind ceases to be occupied with the 
voluntary activity of thinking in words, and instead 
becomes occupied with a succession of vague images 
which are surface effects of the repressed contents of 
the unconscious. A similar condition is found in reverie, 
that is, in the state in which we have relaxed the volun¬ 
tary activity of the mind. It is found that those to 
whom this state of outcropping is most normal are those 
to whom autosuggestion is easiest—as artists, women 
and children. The first step which Dr Baudouin sug¬ 
gests in the practice of autosuggestion is an education of 
the outcropping by practice in the production of these 
states. This is done by keeping the body motionless and 
the muscles relaxed while we are resting on a comfort- 


166 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


able armchair under conditions as free as possible from 
such external distractions as noise. The eyes are closed 
and the effort of thinking is relaxed, while the mind is 
allowed to occupy itself with the vague images which 
float past it. Baudouin speaks of the state of outcrop¬ 
ping produced by such a relaxation as le recueillement . 1 

Le recueillement, however, is merely a preliminary 
stage. The equivalent of attention for which we are 
searching is a combination of this condition of out¬ 
cropping with the effortless permeation of the mind by 
a single idea. Baudouin calls this state la contention. 
It is sometimes found to be the condition of the mind on 
waking up after sleep; directed thinking is at a mini¬ 
mum, and at the same time the mind is exclusively 
occupied with one single idea. This is the condition in 
which the idea occupying the mind will realise itself as 
an autosuggestion. In order to be successful in the 
attainment of the state of contention, it is necessary to 
cultivate both the power of attention and of relaxation. 
It is suggested that the former should be cultivated by 
such exercises as learning by heart, and the latter by 
the practice of le recueillement. 

The state of contention is found to be described both 
in the literature of Christian prayer, under the name of 
the Prayer of Simplicity, and in Yoga practice, under 
the name of Dharana. The prayer of simplicity will be 
described more fully later. Normally, it was produced 
involuntarily as an effect of prolonged discursive medi¬ 
tation, but voluntary efforts to attain the prayer of 
simplicity by the suppression of the images found in the 
condition of recueillement were made by the Quietists. 


*1 have retained the original French for Dr Baudouin’s names 
for these conditions, since their English equivalents suggest meanings 
remote from those intended. 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 167 

The Yogis attained Dharana by the preliminary prac¬ 
tice of Pratyahara. This was the condition of outcrop¬ 
ping produced in le recueillement from which its normal 
content of images was progressively banished, appar¬ 
ently (as in quietism) by voluntary effort. 

Reflective autosuggestion may be practised by taking 
advantage of the condition between sleeping and waking 
by permeating the mind at this time without effort with 
the thought which it is desired to realise—the idea, for 
example, of the cure of some illness or weakness. The 
difficulty is to find some way of keeping the mind per¬ 
meated with a thought without the effort of attending 
to it. The way this is done in the new Nancy practice 
is by summing up the desired thought in some formula 
which is repeated over and over again. It is particularly 
emphasised that the repetition is to be mechanical; no 
effort is to be made to think of the idea it is intended to 
convey. If one wishes to make an autosuggestion at 
some other time of the day, this may be done by an arti¬ 
ficial production of the state of la contention . Outcrop¬ 
ping is first produced by the practice of le recueillement 
as already described, and the mind is then permeated 
with the desired idea by the repetition of a formula as 
before. 

Relaxation is not, however, the only method of pro¬ 
ducing the state of outcropping. If the attention is kept 
fixed for some time on one subject, it relaxes itself 
spontaneously through loss of interest and probably 
fatigue. When it relaxes itself in this way, a state of out¬ 
cropping is produced similar to that in le recueillement 
or reverie. This is the condition which Baudouin calls 
hypnosis. It differs from reverie in the fact that it is 
more favourable to the production of the state of con¬ 
tention with a single idea. The reason for this is that in 


168 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

reverie we tend to have dispersion of mind, while in 
hypnosis the immobility with which the state started re¬ 
mains a dominating tendency, hence this immobility is 
readily re-established when we wish to transform the 
state into one of contention for the purposes of auto¬ 
suggestion. 

He also proposes the name of la concentration for a 
state of hypnosis produced by the fixation of the atten¬ 
tion not on an external object but on the idea which is 
to be the object of the suggestion. Notice that this is 
not the state of intense voluntary attention to which we 
generally give the name of “concentration.” He defines 
this condition as follows: “a state of autohypnosis and 
of persistent contention with one idea, the autohypnosis 
having been induced by the lulling influence of the idea 
on the mind.” The simplest way of producing la con¬ 
centration is to sum up the idea in a short phrase and to 
repeat it over and over again, either aloud or sketching 
its pronunciation with lips and tongue. 

We may notice here an odd difference between the 
practice of the new Nancy school in the attainment of 
hypnosis and the practice of religious systems when 
their adherents are trying to attain a similar state of 
emptiness of mind. The new Nancy recommendation 
is that the body should be relaxed on a comfortable 
chair. In the mental exercises of Yoga, on the other 
hand, the meditant adopts a position of extreme discom¬ 
fort. There are a large number of different attitudes he 
may adopt which are called the asana positions, all of 
which have in common the fact that they are positions 
of great muscular strain. In one of them, for example, 
the meditant sits bolt upright with the legs folded so 
that each of the feet is resting on the thigh of the other 
leg. It is said that the Yogi can remain in such a posi- 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 169 

tion for many hours. It might be supposed that such 
continuous discomfort would make any mental exercise 
impossible, yet there can be little doubt that the asana 
positions have been continued because experience has 
shown that they help forward the end to be attained. 
Probably the explanation is to be found by an extension 
of Baudouin’s explanation of the condition of hypnosis 
as a result of the fatiguing of the attention. The 
strained posture of the Yogi immobilises his attention 
on to the physical discomfort of his position and the 
subsequent fatigue of the attention produces the 
hypnoidal condition with its characteristic tendency to 
pass into contention when an object of thought is pre¬ 
sented to it. If this is the true explanation of the asana 
positions, it suggests that the method of relaxation is 
possibly not the best for autosuggestion, since it should 
tend to produce reverie and dispersion of the attention 
rather than the fixity of attention required. It may also 
be noticed that in Christian meditation it is found, as a 
matter of common experience, that the comparatively 
uncomfortable position of kneeling is better than re¬ 
laxation on a comfortable chair. While the latter posi¬ 
tion makes it easy to detach the thoughts from imme¬ 
diate stimuli, it also encourages the vague and uncon¬ 
trolled wandering of the mind found in reverie or day¬ 
dreaming. For this reason it is a position not favoured 
for meditation in which the control of the thoughts is 
the principal object. 

It has already been mentioned that the method of 
presenting the object of a reflective autosuggestion to 
the mind is the mechanical repetition of a formula em¬ 
bodying the suggestion. An important practical ques¬ 
tion is that of the wording of this formula. We will sup¬ 
pose that we are suffering from toothache and wish to 


170 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

remove the pain by autosuggestion. If we use the 
formula I want to be free from this pain, we shall find 
such a formulation too weak to be effective. If we go to 
the opposite extreme and say I have no toothache, our 
present experience of the toothache contradicts us. A 
suggestion in this form is successful only with those 
whose critical function is abnormally undeveloped. For 
more ordinary people, it is necessary to adopt some 
formula which is intermediate between these two ex¬ 
tremes. The kind which is recommended is one which 
asserts that the undesired condition is growing better. 
For removing the pain of toothache, we may use the 
form: This is passing away. If we wish to use autosug¬ 
gestion to help ourselves to sleep, we may repeat: I am 
falling asleep. A detail insisted on by the new Nancy 
school is that the formula should be gabbled. This is to 
prevent the spontaneous autosuggestion contradicting 
the formula from arising in the mind between each repe¬ 
tition of it. For example, if the repetition of the 
formula I am falling asleep is slow, it is difficult to pre¬ 
vent the mind from thinking between each repetition, 
I am not really, I am still as wide-awake as ever. If this 
happens, the spontaneous autosuggestion of remaining 
awake will tend to realise itself and thus defeat the re¬ 
flective autosuggestion of falling asleep. 

The following are the uses of reflective autosugges¬ 
tion claimed by Dr Baudouin. It can undo the evil work 
of noxious spontaneous autosuggestions—the illnesses 
which result from morbid preoccupation with the state 
of our health, and so on. It can be used for the cure of all 
functional disorders such as tics and hysterical paraly¬ 
ses and swellings. It is also of value in certain organic 
complaints. It can always help the natural process of 
cure, and it can undo the part played even in real or- 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 171 

ganic disorders by spontaneous autosuggestion. It may 
also be used as a means of removing bad habits, and of 
obtaining complete control over sleep. In the new 
Nancy school, it is not recommended that particular 
suggestions for the removal of specific troubles should 
be frequently repeated. After a trouble has been made 
the subject of a particular suggestion, it is claimed that 
it is sufficient to repeat about twenty times every night 
and morning the general formula: Day by day, in all re¬ 
spects, I get better and better. 

Autosuggestion is connected with a particular aspect 
of prayer—its subjective effect on the person praying. 
With one exception (to be noted later) prayer is not an 
activity undertaken merely for the sake of its effects on 
the mind or character of the subject, but primarily for 
the purpose of coming into communion with or other¬ 
wise affecting the Being to whom prayer is addressed. 
Its subjective effects, although they may be important, 
are generally only incidental from the point of view of 
the person praying. It is these subjective effects, how¬ 
ever, which come within the province of a psychological 
study; and, regarded as a producer of subjective effects, 
prayer is clearly of the nature of reflective autosugges¬ 
tion undertaken with the intention of bringing about 
changes in that sum of mental dispositions which we call 
character. Even regarded merely as autosuggestion, it 
is probable that prayer must always be more effective 
than autosuggestion deliberately and self-consciously . 
carried out. For precisely that element which was seen 
to be most essential and most difficult to attain in 
reflective autosuggestion—the abandonment of volun¬ 
tary effort—is provided naturally by the mental atti¬ 
tude of prayer. We may take as an example of this, the 
familiar experience which is heard again and again in 


172 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

the testimony of religious converts who say “I struggled 
against such and such a sin, but its power over me 
simply grew greater. Then I realised that I could not 
conquer in my own strength and I gave up struggling 
and left it in the hands of the Lord, and the burden of 
my sin rolled away.” Without prejudice to the religious 
explanation of the convert, may w T e not see in this a 
simple working of psychological mechanisms? First, 
there is the spontaneous autosuggestion that he will 
fall into his habitual sin, which, by the law of reversed 
effort, becomes strengthened by a voluntary struggle 
against it. Then in prayer he saturates his mind with 
the thought of the desired improvement, while his trust 
in an all-powerful God whose grace can save him from 
the sin, makes possible that abandonment of voluntary 
effort which was impossible in his preliminary period 
of struggle. So unconsciously he has produced in him¬ 
self the conditions for effective reflective autosugges¬ 
tion, and he finds himself freed without effort from a sin 
against which his efforts were unavailing. Thus, relig¬ 
ious faith provides in perfection the conditions for the 
subjective working of prayer to become effective as 
autosuggestion; conditions, let it be noted, which can¬ 
not be reproduced by using the form of prayer without 
the faith. 

When speaking of prayer, I intend to use the word in 
the extended sense usual to devotional writers on the 
subject, and not merely to mean praise and petition. In 
this extended sense, we call prayer any mental exercise 
whose aim is religious, or any mental state of religious 
character. In Christianity, if we wish to take over a 
terminology for the science of prayer, we are almost in¬ 
evitably led to adopt that of Roman Catholicism. The 
reason for this is not merely that prayer has been more 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 173 

developed amongst Roman Catholics because it is the 
sole occupation of some of the religious orders; but also 
that the custom of revealing their methods of prayer 
to their directors has led to an introspective habit of 
mind which had as its fruit a methodical classification 
of types of prayer which is without parallel in any other 
branch of Christianity. I shall, therefore, in this part 
of my work, follow the terminology of Fr. Poulain, in 
his Graces of Interior Prayer (a terminology which is 
largely modelled on that of St Teresa), although my 
angle of approach is a different one from his. 

First, we may notice that in devotional books are to 
be found a simple form of prayer called acts, which are 
almost purely autosuggestions and are intended as such. 
At the opposite extreme is to be found ordinary vocal 
prayer, i.e. prayer in the popular sense of praise and 
petition, in which the whole of the intention is centred 
on the Being to whom prayer is addressed and not at all 
on the production of any desirable mental effects. Be¬ 
tween these, there is the wide range of the various forms 
of mental prayer of which the most familiar is medita¬ 
tion. In these the purpose of mental self-improvement 
and of entering into communion with God are inextri¬ 
cably mingled. Some forms of meditation are very 
much like forms of non-religious mental exercise in 
which mental culture is the only object. But in all 
religious meditation, the religious element is present 
as well. 

First, we may consider the acts which are simple auto¬ 
suggestions whose object is to strengthen belief or love, 
or self-sacrifice, or any other desired mental disposition. 
The following, which will serve as an example of what is 
meant, is an act of faith copied from a devotional 
book: 


174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

0 my God, I believe with a most firm faith all those 
things which Thou hast revealed in the Holy Scriptures 
and which Thy Holy Church teaches. I believe in One 
True and Living God, my beginning and my end, and 
that in this One God there are Three distinct Persons, 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. I believe that the 
Second Person, God the Son, became Man, and 
died upon the Cross, to deliver us from all sin, death, 
and hell. When I cannot understand Thy Revelation, 
I bow down my understanding and my will to worship 
Thee. In this faith I now live; in the same, by Thy 
grace, I resolve to die. Lord, increase my faith. 

In connection with vocal prayer, there is little to 
notice of psychological interest in addition to what has 
already been said about prayer in general. Perhaps, 
however, it will be well to notice that every effort of 
vocal prayer is, apart from its immediate Godward in¬ 
tention, a means of devotional education. There is a 
temptation, at the present time, on the strength of a 
superficial acquaintance with the literature of mysti¬ 
cism, for advisers in devotional practice to decry the 
practice of praying in words even by beginners, and to 
recommend that prayer should only be practised when 
it is felt to be real. From such dangers, Catholic mysti¬ 
cism has been saved by its effective touch with the needs 
of the ordinarily devout person. It should be noticed 
that for the education of the subconscious in reflective 
autosuggestion a form of words is used, and so far as one 
desires a similar effect to follow from prayer, a similar 
method must be used. It is true that there are later 
forms of non-mystical prayer in which thinking in words 
is not carried on, but it seems reasonable to suppose 
that such a later development is a result of subconscious 
dispositions already produced by verbal exercises. And, 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 175 

if the religious man desires to develop a devotional 
habit of mind, it is certain that he can only do this by 
carrying out the same form of prayer whatever his 
feelings may be. The closest psychological parallel to 
this is perhaps also reflective autosuggestion. An auto¬ 
suggestion is not practised only when the subject feels 
*real affect in connection with it. 

The devotion of the Rosary is one which approaches 
to meditation proper. In the recitation of the Rosary, 
the state called contention by Baudouin, is induced by 
the repetition of the Hail Mary, while the attempt is 
made to keep the mind fixed on the thought of one of 
the fifteen mysteries. This is clearly an exercise allied to 
the Mantra Yoga, in which there is a similar repetition 
of one of the formulae called mantras, or of the word 
Aum. If in the Rosary, the formula repeated were ex¬ 
pressive of the mystery itself, this would be an example 
of what Baudouin calls concentration. 

As a typical example of meditation, we may take the 
Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola. This is a 
series of discursive reflections supposed to be made by a 
person during the course of a retreat lasting a month. 
Each of these was supposed to take an hour, and five 
were performed each day. 

Each meditation was preceded by a preparatory 
prayer asking that its performance may be directed to 
the glory of God. The retreatant then constructed 
in visual imagery the object of the meditation (ver con 
la vista de la imaginacion el lugar corporeo donde se 
halla la cosa que quiero contemplar). This was fol¬ 
lowed by a prayer for the appropriate emotions—for 
joy, sorrow or shame, according to the subject of the 
meditation. 

The meditation was conventionally divided into three 


176 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

parts. As a typical example, I will describe the first of 
the exercises, which has as its subject three sins. The 
first part of this meditation is on the sin of the fallen 
angels. The instructions to the meditant are as follows: 

The first point will be to carry the memory over the 
first sin, which was that of the Angels, and then the 
understanding over the same, reasoning; then the will, 
seeking to remember and understand it all, that I may 
the more blush and be confounded, bringing into com¬ 
parison with the one sin of the Angels those many sins 
of mine; and seeing that they for one sin have gone to 
hell, how often I have deserved it for so many. I say, 
to bring into memory the sin of the Angels, how hav¬ 
ing been created in grace, and then refusing to help 
themselves by the aid of their liberty to pay reverence 
and obedience to their Creator and Lord, coming to 
pride, they were changed from grace to malice, and 
cast down from heaven to hell; and so consequently 
to discourse more in detail with the understanding, and 
thereupon more to stir the affections by the will. 

In the second and third parts, he is instructed to carry 
the three faculties of memory, understanding and will, 
in the same manner, over the sin of Adam and Eve, and 
over the sin of some particular person who has gone to 
hell for one mortal sin. The meditation ends with a 
colloquy in which the meditant imagines Christ or God 
the Father or the Blessed Virgin before him: 

“The colloquy,” says St Ignatius, “is made, properly 
speaking, just as one friend speaks to another, or a 
servant to his master, now asking for some favour, now 
reproaching oneself for some evil done, now telling 
out one’s affairs and seeking counsel in them.” 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 177 

The course of meditations was to be made with the 
accompaniments of solitude, penitence and exterior 
penances (fasting and other austerities). His instruc¬ 
tions as to posture are much less systematised than those 
of the Yogis, and appear to be entirely different in their 
aim. He tells the meditant that he should “enter upon 
the contemplation, now kneeling, now prostrate on the 
ground, now lying back with uplifted face, now sitting, 
now standing, aiming ever at seeking what I want.” 

A small point which the psychologist will find inter¬ 
esting is that St Ignatius makes the following recom¬ 
mendation : 

after going to bed, when I am composing myself to 
sleep, for the space of one Hail Mary to think of the 
hour at which I ought to rise, and to what purpose, 
recapitulating the Exercise which I have to make. 

Some Protestant critics of the Ignatian method make 
a great deal of what he says about the control of breath¬ 
ing during prayer. These criticisms are not always very 
fair nor do they show any intelligent grasp of the nature 
of the system. Although methods of breathing control, 
Pranayama, play a large part in the devotional prac¬ 
tices of Yoga, they do not in the Ignatian exercises, nor 
(so far as I know) in any other Christian devotional 
system. The only mention St Ignatius makes of the 
breath is a trivial one. It is in what he calls prayer 
by rhythmical beats, the method of which is that: 

with each breath or respiration one is to pray mentally, 
saying one word of the Our Father, or of any other 
prayer that is being recited, so that one word only is 
said between one breath and another; and, in the 
length of time between one breath and another, one is 


178 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

to look chiefly to the meaning of such word, or to the 
person to whom one recites it, or to one’s own lowly 
estate, etc. 

Probably this is a method of meditation which would be 
found to be easy during external distractions. 

A particularly simple form of meditation which occu¬ 
pies the third and fourth week of the Exercises is what 
St Ignatius calls a contemplation. This is a meditation 
in which the subject is an incident from the life of Our 
Lord, and the preparatory composition of place is sim¬ 
ply the visualisation of the scene of this incident. There 
is some confusion caused by the fact that, in mystical 
theology, the word contemplation is used in an entirely 
different sense to mean the characteristic mental state 
of mystical prayer. It seems better to avoid the con¬ 
fusion by restricting the word contemplation to the lat¬ 
ter sense of it, and to describe the meditation from an 
incident in the gospels as an Ignatian contemplation. 

We may next ask what is the purpose of meditation? 
In reading the Exercises of St Ignatius, we are struck 
by the fact that their immediate aim is essentially a 
practical one. It is to enable the retreatant to make a 
practical choice between a life in which the religious 
motive is the dominant one and a more ordinary life 
in which action is dictated by a variety of motives. In 
some cases, but not in all, this is expected to resolve 
itself into a choice between the monastic life and the life 
of the world. In all cases, the purpose of the medita¬ 
tions is to determine the retreatant in the choice of 
what would be called in the language of Protestant de¬ 
votion consecration, or a surrender to the will of God. 

This practical aim does not, however, exhaust the 
purpose of meditation. It is a method of education of 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 179 

the subconscious, as is the new Nancy autosuggestion. 
The meditations on sin are designed to strengthen the 
emotional resistance against sin. (It must be remem¬ 
bered that his use of auricular confession protects the 
user of the Exercises from the dangers which we have 
seen to attend a too great emotional reaction against 
sin.) The Ignatian contemplation strengthens the feel¬ 
ing of love for and of belief in the Incarnate. The collo¬ 
quies strengthen both the belief in the persons to whom 
they are addressed and the emotions connected with 
them. We may sum all this up by saying that the pur¬ 
pose of the education of the subconscious achieved by 
the meditations is the strengthening of the religious 
sentiment. This is not, of course, inconsistent with the 
view that their aim is also practical, for the strengthen¬ 
ing of any sentiment means also the development of the 
behaviour which springs from that sentiment. 

It is true that Protestantism has not very much 
developed the practice of meditation, and probably 
Protestantism is poorer for its loss. The loss is, how¬ 
ever, less than might appear at first sight. The educa¬ 
tion of the subconscious, accomplished by meditation in 
the mind of the Catholic, is accomplished for the Prot¬ 
estant by sermons, by scriptural reading, and by vocal 
prayer. The very much larger place taken by sermons 
in Protestant devotion is probably accounted for by the 
fact that they are required to fulfil this need previously 
supplied by meditation. 

The kind of mental prayer so far described has been 
clearly an activity of directed thinking. In the lan¬ 
guage of the faculty psychology, it is a prayer of the 
understanding. But if meditation be habitual, it is not 
found to remain in this form. Habitual meditation on 
religious subjects finally makes them so familiar to the 


180 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

mind that when the meditant directs his attention to¬ 
wards them, he passes immediately into a condition of 
contention with the idea of the subject of meditation. 
In other words, directed thinking practically ceases 
while the mind remains permeated with the idea in 
question. Any attempt at discursive meditation be¬ 
comes difficult at this stage, and the only voluntary ac¬ 
tivity necessary is that required to keep the mind 
from wandering from the subject in hand. This state of 
prayer is called the prayer of simplicity or acquired con¬ 
templation. I have already pointed out that this ap¬ 
pears to be the same as the Yoga dharanya. The Quiet- 
ists taught that this state should be induced by the 
deliberate suppression of all mental activity in prayer. 
Thus, Molinos says: “consider nothing, desire nothing, 
will nothing, endeavour after nothing; and then in 
everything, thy soul will live reposed with quiet and 
enjoyment.” This teaching, however, was strongly 
opposed by orthodox theologians, particularly by the 
Jesuits, who considered that although the prayer of 
simplicity might come as a result of meditation in the 
ordinary way, no attempt ought to be made to suspend 
mental activity in order to reach it. 

If we wish to understand at all the different kinds of 
prayer, it seems desirable to distinguish the prayer of 
simplicity from the different forms of mystical prayer 
which will be discussed in the next chapter. There 
seems to be adequate psychological justification for the 
distinction, and it can only lead to confusion of thought 
to apply the name Prayer of Quiet to the non-mystical 
prayer of simplicity. The two features particularly to 
be noticed about this state of contention, called the 
prayer of simplicity, are the extent to which it is under 
voluntary control and the variety of subjects with which 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 181 

it may be occupied. In both of these respects it differs 
from mystical prayer. It is entered on voluntarily and 
may be left by a simple redirection of the attention. It 
may be contention with any religious idea. The idea 
may be simply that of the presence of God, but not 
necessarily. 

A form of prayer intermediate between ordinary med¬ 
itation and the prayer of simplicity is called affective 
prayer. This is a discursive meditation in which the 
directed thinking is less while the emotional accompani¬ 
ments are greater than in ordinary meditation. In the 
following extract from Fr. Nouet, both affective prayer 
and the prayer of simplicity are described: 

When the man of prayer has made considerable 
progress in meditation, he passes insensibly to affective 
prayer, which, being between meditation and contem¬ 
plation, as the dawn is between the night and the 
day, possesses something both of the one and of the 
other. In its beginnings it contains more of medita¬ 
tion, because it still makes use of reasoning, although 
but little in comparison with the time it devotes to the 
affections; because, having acquired much light by 
the prolonged use of considerations and reasonings, it 
enters at once into its subject, and sees all its develop¬ 
ments without much difficulty, whence it is that the 
will is soon moved. Hence it arises that in proportion 
as it perfects itself, it discards reasonings, and being 
content with a simple glance, with a sweet remem¬ 
brance of God and of Jesus Christ, His only Son, it 
produces many loving affections according to the vari¬ 
ous motions that it receives from the Holy Ghost. But 
when it has arrived at the highest point of affection, it 
simplifies its affections equally with its lights; so that 
the soul will remain sometimes for an hour, sometimes 
for a day, sometimes more, in the same sentiments of 


182 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

love, or contrition, or reverence, or some other move¬ 
ment the impression of which she has received . 1 

Before we pass on to mystical prayer, there are a few 
questions in connection with the relationship between 
autosuggestion and heterosuggestion and religious prac¬ 
tice, which may conveniently be dealt with here. First, 
we may notice the connection between the therapeutic 
use of suggestion and religion. It is generally supposed 
that the miraculous cures of Holy Places are results of 
autosuggestion, and the attempt to revive gifts of heal¬ 
ing in religious bodies at the present time is largely an 
attempt to replace this uncontrolled healing suggestion, 
by the same thing deliberately used with full conscious¬ 
ness of its scientific meaning. If it be granted that the 
cures of Lourdes are results of autosuggestion, working 
under the particularly favourable conditions of a simple 
religious trust, which makes the requisite abandonment 
of effort reasonable and easy, it by no means follows 
that the scientifically self-conscious use of the same 
means as methods of autosuggestion, would produce the 
same effect. If we ask a cripple to undertake a pil¬ 
grimage because it will set to work a curative auto¬ 
suggestion, we are not reproducing the conditions under 
which he might be cured if we told him to go on a 
pilgrimage because the Blessed Virgin would work a 
miracle for him, and we cannot expect the same results. 
This may be one of the unavoidable losses which accom¬ 
pany intellectual enlightenment. On the other hand, it 
may be possible for the modern man, with full accept¬ 
ance of the point of view of modern science, to find a 
reasonable ground for approaching religious healing 

1 Conduite de VHomme d’Oraison, quoted by Poulain in The 
Graces of Interior Prayer. 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 183 

with just the same simplicity of faith as the pilgrim at 
Lourdes. Then, and only then, will the miracles of 
Lourdes be possible for him. 

We must, however, be on our guard against the 
danger of taking for granted the assumption that the 
ideals of religion and of a healthy-minded system of 
autosuggestion, such as New Thought, are the same. If 
the ideal of religion were primarily to implant in its fol¬ 
lowers thoughts of health, happiness and beauty, so that 
they might be realised as beneficent autosuggestions, it 
is certain that existing religious systems do not succeed 
in that object very well. Thoughts of disease, failure 
and ugliness are dwelt on in religious devotion, although 
these are the thoughts which must be most sternly dis¬ 
couraged by a healthy-minded system of autosugges¬ 
tion. Such a system could find nothing of value to it in 
the Christian hymns on the Passion, or in such a devo¬ 
tion as the Stations of the Cross. It does not seem nec¬ 
essary to suppose that, in retaining these elements, his¬ 
torical Christianity has merely made a vast blunder in 
mental therapeutics. Whether rightly or wrongly, it 
has not considered that mental therapy was its principal 
aim. It has supposed that in thoughts of pain and 
disease, it is drawing on a source of spiritual enrichment 
compared with which the health and happiness drawn 
from the shallow optimism of healthy-minded thinking 
is a trivial and a worthless thing. 

These considerations lead us naturally on to enquire 
whether there are any difficulties or dangers in auto¬ 
suggestion or in the methods of prayer which are most 
closely allied to it. The gravest medical objection 
against a cure by any kind of suggestion is that it is often 
merely a removal of a symptom while the underlying 
cause of the symptom remains untouched. We are not, 


184 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


however, particularly concerned with this, since we are 
not discussing autosuggestion as a method of curing 
diseases. There remain two criticisms which touch us 
more closely. 

The first of these is the generally admitted fact that 
the practice of autosuggestion increases the suggestibil¬ 
ity of the person practising it. This, as has been pointed 
out earlier, is an objection to the use of suggestion in 
any form. Baudouin, however, distinguishes in hetero¬ 
suggestion between acceptivity, the ease with which a 
suggestion is received from another person, and sugges¬ 
tibility, the capacity of a person for realising an idea 
whatever has been its origin. He states that acceptivity 
is an undesirable factor, but that without an exag¬ 
gerated acceptivity, a high degree of suggestibility is a 
source of strength and is to be desired. It is, of course, 
suggestibility in this restricted sense and not acceptivity 
that is brought into play in autosuggestion. Now it will 
hardly be denied that autosuggestion is free from the 
grave defect in the use of heterosuggestion, that the 
subject’s independence of character is destroyed by the 
increased ease with which he receives suggestions from 
another person. But it is by no means certain that 
suggestibility, even in Baudouin’s restricted sense, is 
not a dangerous element in character if it is over-devel¬ 
oped. It has been argued that such over-development 
of suggestibility by a prolonged use of autosuggestion, 
may lead to mental dissociation, which is a condition 
characterising a certain class of mental disorders. Al¬ 
though this cannot be regarded as definitely proved, it is 
at least a possibility which must be considered seriously. 
In addition to this, it is clear that an over-developed 
suggestibility would expose us dangerously to the action 
of noxious spontaneous autosuggestions. The advo- 


WORSHIP AND PRAYER 185 

cates of autosuggestion reply that that does not matter 
since these can then be adequately dealt with by reflec¬ 
tive autosuggestion. But we may still doubt whether it 
is wise to throw away our protective armour, because 
we are confident that our use of the sword is sufficiently 
expert to enable us to parry any blow that may be aimed 
at us. 

This, however, is only a particular aspect of a charge 
made against autosuggestion, that it is essentially an 
infantile mode of behaviour. Its abandonment of vol¬ 
untary effort, its cultivation of what Baudouin calls the 
imagination as opposed to the will, is stated to be an 
abandonment of a grown-up way of dealing with diffi¬ 
culties in favour of a childish one. This criticism is 
made sometimes by psychologists who regard the com¬ 
plete control of conduct by the rational forces of the 
conscious will as the proper condition of the mind of a 
grown person, and look upon irrational and instinctive 
mental elements as things which ought to have been 
superseded. To them any effort to direct these irra¬ 
tional forces otherwise than by consciously and delib¬ 
erately overruling them is objectionable, so necessarily 
they condemn autosuggestion in any form, and they 
disapprove of any mental exercise which has not as its 
object the strengthening of the conscious will. This, 
however, is a view of the constitution of mind, which is 
not now generally accepted by psychologists. We look 
upon such irrational forces as necessary elements of 
mind which must be understood and controlled, but 
which cannot be got rid of. However, we call this part 
of the mind the infantile psyche, and recognise the 
undesirability of its being unduly developed. Auto¬ 
suggestion and mental exercises akin to it are dangerous 
if they over-develop the infantile forces of mind. The 


186 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

charge of the orthodox mystical writers against the 
Quietists was, whether justly or not, that they were 
over-developing this side of the mind. Clearly, the 
abandonment of effort is a dangerous formula if it is 
taken as a complete guide to life. It may be im¬ 
portant to know when to abandon voluntary effort, 
but it is surely even more important for effective action 
of any kind to know when voluntary effort is required. 
We saw that the Spiritual Exercises were, like auto¬ 
suggestion, an education of the subconscious; but they 
were also an education of the function of conscious 
conation, which is called the will. The encouragement 
of infantility is the danger which every kind of mental 
self-development must avoid. 


CHAPTER XIII 


CONVERSION 

Dr G. S. Hall has pointed out the close connection 
between conversion and adolescence, and this connec¬ 
tion has been fully illustrated in Starbuck’s well-known 
work, The Psychology of Religion. These authors point 
out that the majority of conversions take place between 
the ages of twelve and twenty-five. They, therefore, 
connect the conversion change with the physiological 
and psychological changes taking place at that time. 
While the recognition and study of this fact have 
marked an important advance in the psychological 
study of conversion, it is to be regretted that most 
writers on the psychology of religion have been so capti¬ 
vated by the simplicity of the formula Conversion is an 
adolescent phenomenon, that they have often fallen 
into the error of supposing that this is all that is to be 
said about religious conversion from the psychologist’s 
point of view. Their omission to consider conversions 
which do not fall under this formula is rendered serious 
by the fact that these exceptions have often been the 
most important religious conversions in history. A 
large number of great religious leaders have been con¬ 
verted late in life; St Paul, St Augustine and Tolstoy 
are well-known examples. It appears preferable, there¬ 
fore, to treat adult and adolescent conversions as two 
separate problems, and to see how far the explanations 
found for one will fit the other and how far they require 
different treatment. 

Using the word conversion in a wide and vague sense, 

187 


188 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

we may say that it is an outbreak into consciousness of 
something, such as a system of beliefs, which seems to 
have had no period of development in the mind. 
Modern psychology, on its pathological side, has been 
interested in other cases of apparent irruptions into 
consciousness of material which seems to have no con¬ 
tinuity with what has previously been in the mind, and 
therefore appears to come into the mind from outside. 
These are commonly explained as due to the influence 
on consciousness of instincts or of sentiments with a 
strong emotional tone which have been repressed from 
the conscious mind, and have become unconscious. 
These unconscious mental dispositions are now com¬ 
monly called complexes. The motive of the repression 
may be that the material concerned is painful, immoral 
or otherwise displeasing to the normal consciousness. 
The repression may be so complete that the repressed 
matter becomes entirely unknown to the conscious 
mind. The force opposed to the repressed complex is 
called a resistance. Though it is lost to consciousness, 
such repressed material has not necessarily lost its 
power; it may influence feeling or conduct in some 
unexpected way. In this case, the individual con¬ 
cerned will be ignorant of the source of influence. 

The struggle between a complex and the opposing 
resistance, if both are conscious, will be present to con¬ 
sciousness as a painful mental conflict. If the complex 
is entirely unconscious this will not be the case, but 
there will still be a real conflict, although it is not pres¬ 
ent to the conscious mind. The time may come when 
the development of the complex has so far advanced 
that the resistance is no longer powerful enough to keep 
it repressed. There is then an outbreak into conscious¬ 
ness of a new mental construction which appears to 


CONVERSION 189 

introspection to have had no period of development in 
the mind.. The system seems to have come to the mind 
from outside, so its outbreak has an apparently super¬ 
natural character. This appearance of the extramental 
origin of the system may be regarded as an illusion due 
to the fact that the process of its incubation was un¬ 
conscious. 

Similar cases of unconscious incubation of mental 
constructions are familiar in ordinary life to everyone 
who is sufficiently introspective to have noticed them. 
Many people, when worried by a problem or by the 
necessity of writing a difficult letter, have the habit of 
dismissing it from their minds and returning to it later. 
They then find that, though they have not thought of it 
at all during the interval, the problem is solved or the 
letter seems to write itself. 

As an example of a consistent attempt to express the 
conversion change, as a result of the outbreak of a re¬ 
pressed complex, we may take a psychological discus¬ 
sion by Dr Jung 1 on the conversion of St Paul: 

Although the moment of a conversion seems some¬ 
times quite sudden and unexpected, yet we know from 
repeated experience that such a fundamental occur¬ 
rence always has a long period of unconscious incuba¬ 
tion. It is only when the preparation is complete, that 
is to say, when the individual is ready to be converted, 
that the new view breaks forth with great emotion. St 
Paul had already been a Christian for a long time, but 
unconsciously; hence his fanatical resistance to the 
Christians, because fanaticism exists chiefly in indi¬ 
viduals who are compensating for secret doubts. The 
incident of his hearing the voice of Christ on his way 
to Damascus marks the moment when the unconscious 

1 “The Psychological Foundation of Belief in Spirits.” Proc. 
SP.R . May, 1920. 


190 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

complex of Christianity became conscious. That the 
auditory phenomenon should represent Christ is ex¬ 
plained by the already existing unconscious Christian 
complex. The complex, being unconscious, was pro¬ 
jected by St Paul on to the external world as if it 
did not belong to him. Unable to conceive of himself 
as a Christian, and on account of his resistance to 
Christ, he became blind, and could only regain his 
sight through submission to a Christian, that is to say, 
through his complete submission to Christianity. 
Psychogenic blindness is, according to my experience, 
always due to an unwillingness to see, i.e. to under¬ 
stand and to accept, what is incompatible with the 
conscious attitude. This was obviously the case with 
St Paul. His unwillingness to see corresponds with 
his fanatical resistance to Christianity. This resist¬ 
ance was never wholly extinguished, a fact of which 
we have proof in the epistles. It broke forth at times 
in the fits he suffered from. It is certainly a great mis¬ 
take to call his fits epileptic. There is no trace of 
epilepsy in them, on the contrary, St Paul himself in 
his epistles gives hints enough as to the real nature of 
the illness. They are clearly psychogenic fits, which 
really mean a return to the old Saul-complex, repressed 
through conversion, in the same way as there had 
previously been a repression of the complex of 
Christianity. 

On this view, the account of St Paul’s conversion is a 
particularly instructive one because it shows the uncon¬ 
scious complex breaking into consciousness as a result 
of its own development. The actual outbreak is not 
determined by an external influence, as in the case of a 
person converted by the hearing of a revival sermon. 
Moreover, the resistance itself is visible in its effects on 
his conduct (in his persecution of the Christians). 
Acceptance of this as a sufficient account of the psycho- 


CONVERSION 


191 


logical mechanism of his conversion does not, of course, 
prevent us from holding, if we have reason to do so, that 
there was an objective ground of St Paul’s visions. 
Psychologically, it would not be a necessary postulate, 
but it is arguable that it might be necessary on other 
grounds. 

Before discussing adult conversion in detail, it is 
necessary to make a distinction between two classes of 
adult conversion, which clearly have their roots in 
entirely different mental processes. These are: ordi¬ 
nary conversion (from an irreligious to a religious life) 
and what is generally called mystical conversion (from 
an ordinary religious life to the life of a mystic). It is 
with ordinary adult conversion that we are concerned at 
present, and for the psychological mechanism of this, I 
am of the opinion that Dr Jung’s explanation is sub¬ 
stantially correct. We seem to be able to give an ade¬ 
quate account of this by assuming the presence of a 
growing sentiment, kept unconscious by a resistance, 
which finally overthrows that resistance and establishes 
itself in a dominant position in the conscious life. 

We notice, however, that in ordinary conversion itself 
there is considerable variation in the nature of the re¬ 
sistance and the impulse which it is opposing. We may 
conveniently classify these differences by saying that 
the conflict may be mainly moral, mainly intellectual 
or mainly social. By a social conflict I mean one in 
which the contending interests are loyalties to two 
mutually opposed communities. It is likely that all 
three of these elements enter into every conversion, but 
it is possible to make a rough distinction into classes in 
which one or other of them is dominant. 

The first class, in which the conflict is moral, is the 
most familiar, since most of the reported conversions of 
revival preachers are of this type. The repressed com- 


192 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


plex may be a desire to escape from excessive drinking 
or from sexual indulgence, or from any other kind of 
behaviour which is regarded as sinful. The interest 
behind the complex may be genuinely religious in char¬ 
acter—a desire to be “right with God.” This interest is 
often, however, supplemented or replaced by others—by 
a wish for the approval of other people or of one’s self, 
by a fear of the consequences of continued indulgence, 
etc . 1 This is recognised by the revival preacher who, in 
addition to the purely religious appeal, eloquently de¬ 
scribes the horrors of a drunkard’s end or the pains of 
hell. Thus, Jonathan Edwards says: 

There will be no end to the exquisite, horrible misery. 
The inhabitants of heaven and all the universe will 
look on and praise God’s justice. No prayer w T ill miti¬ 
gate God’s hate and contempt, for He can no longer 
pity. You would have gone to hell last night had 
he not held you like a loathsome spider over the flames 
by a thread . 2 

We will take two examples of the moral conversion. 
Both are given in a book called Stories of Grace, by the 
Rev. C. S. Isaacson. 

The first took place after a sermon preached in a 
small church in Basingstoke: 

Amongst the crowd in the centre of the aisle there 
stood a man so noted for his ungodliness and profane 
language as to be known in Basingstoke by the name 
of “Swearing Tom.” He was a leader in sin and pro¬ 
fanity, and for seventeen years he had never entered 

1 It must be added that one of these interests may be of in¬ 
stinctive origin. Even when discussing sexual indulgence, it is 
necessary to insist on the falsity of a manner of talking about it 
which assumes that unlimited indulgence is natural, while restraint 
is always a work of grace. Excessive sexual indulgence is as truly 
a violation of an instinct as is absolute continence. 

2 “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Works , 1807 vu 
p. 486. 


CONVERSION 193 

a church. It was only curiosity which brought him 
now. The text was taken from the prophecy of Eze¬ 
kiel, “I will put a new spirit within you.” Towards 
the close of the sermon the preacher quoted the 
words, “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good 
gifts unto your children, how much more shall your 
heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that 
ask Him?” (Luke xi. 13), remarking that, contrary 
to the conclusion which might have been expected, 
“the offer was not to children, but simply to those 
who asked. There was nothing, therefore, between 
the worst of men and this most blessed gift from 
heaven but to ask for it.” He then added, “If the most 
wicked man in this church would go home and pray 
that God, for Christ’s sake, would give him His Holy 
Spirit to change his heart, God would hear and answer 
that man’s prayer.” 

These words went straight to the heart of “Swear¬ 
ing Tom.” “I am the worst man here,” he said to 
himself; “I will go home and pray.” As he went he 
had to pass by the familiar public-house, but, un¬ 
moved by the calls of his companions, he refused to 
turn in. On reaching his home he threw himself on 
his knees, and tried to pray in the words which he 
had heard from the pulpit. The prayer was answered. 
From that time he became a changed man, and his 
name of “Swearing Tom” was soon altered to that 
of “Praying Tom,” by which he was known till the 
day of his death. 1 

The next account is that given of himself by Mr 
Brownlow North, who became, after his conversion, a 
revival preacher. He was of noble birth, and up to the 
age of forty-five he led a gay life in Aberdeen. 

It pleased God, in the month of November, 1854, 
one night, when I was sitting playing at cards, to make 
1 Stories of Grace, by the Rev. C. S. Isaacson, pp. 129, 130. 


194 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


me concerned about my soul. The instrument used 
was a sensation of sudden illness, which led me to 
think that I was going to die. I said to my son, “I 
am a dead man; take me upstairs.” As soon as this 
was done, I threw myself down on the bed. My first 
thought was then, “Now, what will my forty-four years 
of following the devices of my own heart profit me? 
In a few minutes I shall be in hell, and what good 
will all these things do me for which I have sold my 
soul?” At that moment I felt constrained to pray, but 
it was merely the prayer of a coward, a cry for mercy. 

I was not sorry for what I had done, but I was afraid 
of the punishment of my sin. And yet there was 
something trying to prevent me putting myself on 
my knees to call for mercy, and that was the presence 
of the maidservant in the room lighting the fire. 
Though I did not believe at that time that I had ten 
minutes to live, and knew that there was no possible 
hope for me but in the mercy of God, and that if I 
did not seek that mercy I could not expect to have 
it, yet such was the nature of my heart, and of my 
spirit within me, that it was a balance with me, a 
thing to turn this way or that, I could not tell how, 
whether I should wait till that woman left the room, 
or whether I should fall on my knees and call for 
mercy in her presence. 

By the grace of God I did put myself on my knees 
before that girl, and I believe it was the turning point 
with me. 

This incident started a long and distressing mental 
conflict which ended one night when he was reading and 
came to the passage: “But now the righteousness of 
God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by 
the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God 
which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all 
them that believe.” 


CONVERSION 195 

With that passage light came into my soul. Striking 
the book with my hand and springing from my chair, 
I cried, “If that Scripture is true, I am a saved man! 
That is what I want; that is what God offers me; that 
is what I will have.” God helping me, it was that I 
took: the righteousness of God without the law. It 
was my only hope. 1 

We may here notice, in passing, the precautions neces¬ 
sary in dealing with the material provided for the study 
of conversion by such narratives as those which have 
just been given. 

There is, in the first place, an unavoidable tendency 
towards unconscious falsification on the part of the 
narrators. Experiences recorded later in life than the 
time of their occurrence will be conventionalised in ac¬ 
cordance with the point of view of the narrator at the 
time they are recorded. Features not in harmony with 
the usual accounts of conversions in the convert’s com¬ 
munity will tend to be softened out. Childish experi¬ 
ences are often described in language which obviously 
belongs to a later age. Particularly must we suspect 
accounts which are obviously written for the sake of 
edification, since in these the process of conventionalisa¬ 
tion is certain to have crept in, however little the nar¬ 
rator may suspect it. 

At the same time, we must notice an incompleteness 
in the narratives themselves. The data given are not all 
that the psychological enquirer would need for an ade¬ 
quate investigation into the phenomena received. If 
we accept the conclusions of modern psychology, the 
love-interests of the person concerned are of vital im¬ 
portance in the determination of all the events of his 

1 Op. cit. pp. 18-20, quoting from Records and Recollections, 
Brownlow North. 


196 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

mental life. Generally, in the story of a conversion, 
they are omitted or given in an incomplete form. It is 
rarely that we have a case like that of St Augustine 
where the sexual history of the convert is given without 
reserve. An obvious case of incomplete data is found in 
the second of the narratives already given. Why was 
the subject so powerfully affected by the phrase “with¬ 
out the law”? The account gives no indication. It 
seems clear that it is connected with the getting rid of 
some moral conflict—with its evasion, or perhaps with 
the perception that it was unreal. 

A third point of importance in this connection is the 
fact that, if the psychological point of view we are 
adopting be correct, then some of the most important 
determinants of conversion will not be apparent to in¬ 
trospection since they will be unconscious. For exam¬ 
ple, the psychologist will not find it easy to accept 
Swearing Tom’s statement that he was drawn to church 
merely by curiosity. He will rather be inclined to sus¬ 
pect that this conduct was the result of the already 
working religious complex, but that it was rationalised 
in this way because, since the complex was repressed, 
this motive was unconscious. Similarly, the religious 
background of Brownlow North’s conflict when he 
thought that he was dying is curiously traditional. The 
genuinely irreligious man does not talk or think like 
that. The traditional religious dispositions implanted 
by his childhood teaching have survived in his uncon¬ 
scious and probably play a considerable part in the 
direction of his conversion change. 

Predominantly intellectual conversions present more 
difficulties than the type we have just considered. The 
intellectual conflict seems always to be mixed up with 
moral elements, and it is difficult to tell how far it is real 


CONVERSION 197 

and how far it is merely a rationalisation of a moral 
conflict. That a moral conflict may appear disguised as 
an intellectual one is no new discovery of modern psy¬ 
chology. Clergymen are quite familiar with the fact 
that the doubts of members of their congregations are 
often intimately connected with moral shortcomings in 
their lives. 

St Augustine may be taken as an example of a con¬ 
version of the intellectual type. Of his thirtieth year, 
he writes in his Confessions: 

But me for the most part the habit of satisfying an 
insatiable appetite tormented, while it held me captive. 
... So were we, until Thou, 0 most High, not forsak¬ 
ing our dust, commiserating us miserable, didst come 
to our help, by wondrous and secret ways. 

Continual efforts were made to have me married. I 
wooed, I was promised, chiefly through my mother’s 
pains, that so once married, the health-giving baptism 
might cleanse me, towards which she rejoiced that I 
was being daily fitted. . . . Meanwhile my sins were 
being multiplied, and my concubine being torn from 
my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart which 
clave unto her was torn and wounded and bleeding. 

. . . But unhappy, I, . . . impatient of delay, inas¬ 
much as not till after two years was I to obtain her 
I sought, not being so much a lover of marriage 
as a slave to lust, procured another, though no 
wife. ... To Thee be praise, glory to Thee, Fountain 
of Mercies. I was becoming more miserable, and Thou 
nearer. 

In Book VII, he describes his intellectual difficulties. 
He thought of God as extended in space, though filling 
all things. He was unable to understand the cause of 
evil. He knew that free-will was supposed to be the 


198 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

cause of evil, but he did not find in this a solution of his 
difficulties. 

For He should not be All-mighty, if He might not 
create something good without the aid of that matter 
which Himself had not created. These thoughts I re¬ 
volved in my miserable heart, overcharged with gnaw¬ 
ing cares, lest I should die ere I had found the truth ; 
yet was the faith of Thy Christ, our Lord and Saviour, 
professed in the Church Catholic, firmly fixed in my 
heart, in many points, indeed, as yet unformed and 
fluctuating from the rule of doctrine; yet did not my 
mind utterly leave it, but rather daily took in more 
and more of it. 

By a study of Scripture, he came to have what he con¬ 
sidered a right view of all these questions, and saw that 
iniquity was the perversion of the will. Though accept¬ 
ing Jesus Christ as the Mediator between God and Man, 
he says that he did not understand the true doctrine of 
the Incarnation, not understanding how that saying, 
“The Word was made flesh/’ distinguishes the Catholic 
faith from the heresy of Apollinarius, who taught that 
Christ had no human mind. These difficulties vanished 
away when he studied the writings of St Paul. 

He now accepted the orthodox faith. “But,” he says, 
“for my temporal life, all was wavering, and my heart 
had to he purged jrom the old leaven. The Way, the 
Saviour Himself, well pleased me, but as yet I shrunk 
from going through its straitness.” When told of the 
conversion of Victorinus, Rhetoric Professor at Rome, 
Augustine was on fire to imitate him, but found in him¬ 
self two wills, the one spiritual, the other carnal. These 
struggled within him, until God delivered him out of the 
bonds of desire, wherewith he was bound most straitly 
to carnal concupiscence, and out of the drudgery of 
worldly things. He was afterwards much impressed by 


CONVERSION 199 

the story of St Antony and of the conversion of two 
courtiers, told him by a Christian called Pontianus. 

Then he seemed to see how foul he was, “how crooked 
and defiled, bespotted and ulcerous.” 

What ails us? What heardest thou? The unlearned 
start up and take heaven by force, and we with our 
learning, and without heart, lo, where we wallow in 
flesh and blood! Are we ashamed to follow, because 
others are gone before, and not ashamed not even to 
follow? 

The tumult of his inward contention hurried him to 
the garden of his lodging, where he would be free from 
any fear of interruption. He gives a graphic account of 
the conflict which took place here between his religious 
and moral complex and the resistance opposing it. 

Thus soul-sick was I, and tormented, accusing myself 
much more severely than was my wont, rolling and 
turning me in my chain, till that were wholly broken, 
whereby I now was but just, but still was, held. . . . 
The very toys of toys, and vanities of vanities, my 
ancient mistresses, still held me; they plucked my 
fleshly garment, and whispered softly, “Dost thou cast 
us off?” . . . But now it spake very faintly. For on 
that side whither I had set my face, and whither I 
trembled to go, there appeared unto me the chaste 
dignity of Continence, serene, yet not relaxedly, gay, 
honestly alluring me to come, and doubt not; and 
stretching forth to receive and embrace me, her holy 
hands full of multitudes of good examples. ... I sent 
up these sorrowful words: How long, how long, “to¬ 
morrow and to-morrow”? Why not now? Why not 
this hour make an end to my uncleanness? 

While he was speaking and weeping in bitter contri¬ 
tion, he heard a child chanting, “Take up and read; 
take up and read.” This he took as a command from 


200 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

God, and opening the book by chance, his eyes fell on 
the passage: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in 
chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; 
but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not 
provision for the flesh in concupiscence. 

No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly 
at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of 
serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of 
doubt vanished away. ... For Thou convertedst me 
unto Thyself, so that I sought neither wife, nor any 
hope in this world. 

Of his state after conversion, he says: “This Thy 
whole gift was, to nill what I willed, and to will what 
Thou willedst.” 

The intellectual power of St Augustine, the intro¬ 
spective ability shown in his description of the conflict 
after it has become conscious, and the frankness with 
which he describes his sexual conflict, combine to make 
this an invaluable conversion record. It also illustrates 
the difficulty of distinguishing between the moral and 
intellectual parts of the conflict. St Augustine’s diffi¬ 
culties about the nature of sin are clearly an expression 
of the conflict between his own moral ideals and his 
course of life. It is interesting to notice that his intel¬ 
lectual problems were solved first, and that it was the 
moral conflict alone which was active during the mental 
struggle in the garden. At this time the choice had been 
made in the unconscious, and the moral and religious 
complex needed only the slightest additional stimula¬ 
tion to burst into consciousness. This additional stimu¬ 
lation was provided by the voice of the child and the 
verse of Scripture he read. 

Yet we cannot dismiss the intellectual conflict as a 


CONVERSION 201 

mere rationalisation of the moral one. St Augustine’s 
position as a teacher of philosophy makes it clear that 
his mind was of the intellectual type. It is important to 
recognise the part played by purely emotional disposi¬ 
tions in determining belief and conduct; at the same 
time, we must not forget that intellectual processes also 
play a part in determining belief and conduct, and that 
this part will be larger in minds with an intellectual 
disposition and training. 

It is difficult, however, to find any clear case of a 
purely intellectual conversion in real life. There is 
indeed in fiction the conversion of Robert Elsmere in 
Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel. But the soundness of 
the psychology of this account may be doubted. 

The third kind of adult conversion which we distin¬ 
guished was that in which the main part of the conflict 
appears to be between opposing loyalties. These we 
called social conversions. They will naturally be found 
most commonly as conversions from systems which 
make such demands upon the loyalties of their members 
that a breach with the system involves a complete 
breach with its other members—a tearing apart of the 
bonds between the individual concerned and all the in¬ 
dividuals with whom he has intimate personal relation¬ 
ships. Most religious bodies in the modern civilised 
world do not make their demand upon the loyalties of 
their members in such an extreme form, so amongst 
these bodies we cannot expect to find many conversions 
of this type. They are found, however, in religious 
bodies and amongst races whose community feeling is 
stronger. 

St Paul has already been quoted as a conversion of 
this type. As another example we may take a living 
Christian convert from Hinduism—the Sadhu Sundar 


202 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

Singh. The following is an account of this event in his 
own words: 

When I was out in any town I got people to throw 
stones at Christian preachers. I would tear up the 
Bible and burn it when I had a chance. In the presence 
of my father I cut up the Bible and other Christian 
books and put kerosene oil upon them and burnt them. 
I thought this was a false religion and tried all I could 
to destroy it. I was faithful to my own religion, but I 
could not get any satisfaction or peace, though I per¬ 
formed all the ceremonies and rites of that religion. So 
I thought of leaving it all and committing suicide. 
Three days after I had burnt the Bible, I woke up 
about three o’clock in the morning, had my usual 
bath, and prayed, “0 God, if there is a God, wilt thou 
show me the right way or I will kill myself.” My in¬ 
tention was that, if I got no satisfaction, I would place 
my head upon the railway line when the 5 o’clock train 
passed by and kill myself. If I got no satisfaction in 
this life, I thought I would get it in the next. I was 
praying and praying but got no answer; and I prayed 
for half-an-hour longer hoping to get peace. At 4.30 
a.m. I saw something of which I had no idea at all 
previously. In the room where I was praying I saw 
a great light. I thought the place was on fire. I 
looked round, but could find nothing. Then the 
thought came to me, “Jesus Christ is not dead but liv¬ 
ing and it must be He Himself.” So I fell at His feet 
and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get 
anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. 
This was heaven itself. When I got up, the vision 
had all disappeared; but although the vision disap¬ 
peared the Peace and Joy have remained with me ever 
since. I went off and told my Father that I had 
become a Christian. 1 

1 The Sadhu. Streeter and Appasamy, pp. 5-7. 


CONVERSION 203 

Like the conversion of St Paul, this story seems to be 
satisfactorily explained on the assumption that Chris¬ 
tianity had already been accepted in the unconscious, 
while the affection for his parents and all the other 
social forces of his surroundings were opposing a resist¬ 
ance to the entrance of this conviction into conscious¬ 
ness. The resistance expressed itself as a violent con¬ 
scious hatred of Christianity, and the conflict between 
his repressed conviction and the opposing resistance 
produced such a painful state of mind that he wished to 
end it by suicide. 

This theory of conversion is essentially the same as 
William James’s theory of subconscious incubation. 
The difference, however, is important. Modern mental 
pathology has taught us a great deal more than was 
known in the days of James about the mechanism by 
which complexes are kept unconscious. Repression has 
been studied in a great variety of cases, both where it 
has become pathogenic and where the subject has re¬ 
mained healthy. The theory of subconscious incuba¬ 
tion is no longer a hypothesis introduced to explain the 
peculiarities of this one phenomenon of religious con¬ 
version. It is a process familiar in a number of different 
conditions, and of which the laws are very largely 
known. The theory has, therefore, gained both in 
definiteness and credibility since it was first put forward 
in The Varieties of Religious Experience. 

There are certain difficulties which must be men¬ 
tioned in the way of the acceptance of this account of 
the psychological mechanism of conversion. In the first 
place, it must be admitted that the evidence is neces¬ 
sarily insufficient to demonstrate that this is the mech¬ 
anism of all adult conversions. In certain cases the un¬ 
conscious conflict gives signs of its existence by the 


204 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

effect of the resistance on conduct; but more often it can 
only be an inference from the suddenness of the emer¬ 
gence of the new mental system at conversion. The 
kind of evidence required for complete demonstration is 
a record of the dreams of the individual concerned for a 
period before his conversion. These would reveal any 
repressed complex which was occupying his unconscious 
mind during that time. They could, of course, only be 
analysed after the conversion, since otherwise the com¬ 
plex would be made conscious and it would be necessary 
for the man to integrate it with the rest of his mental 
life, so that its cataclysmic outbreak would be pre¬ 
vented. The difficulties of such an observation are ob¬ 
vious, and, so far as the present writer knows, it has 
never been carried out. 

An objection to all psychological theories of conver¬ 
sion which comes frequently from religious persons 
demands sympathetic treatment, although we cannot 
admit its force. To them it appears that to attribute 
conversion to an action of the mind, which can be 
paralleled in secular life, is equivalent to denying the 
reality of the divine action in conversion. There seems 
to be no sufficient reason for this fear. If we find that 
God works in accordance with law in the physical world, 
we may expect to find that the same will be true in the 
mental world. The only effect, from the point of view 
of the believer, of the theory suggested, is that the inter¬ 
est in the conversion process is shifted from the actual 
moment of conversion to the period of growth of the 
underlying complex. In any case, it seems perilous to 
found an argument for the reality of divine action on 
our ignorance of the mechanism of conversion. That is 
bad philosophy, and it repeats in mental science an error 
of which theologians have already repented in biology. 


CHAPTER XIV 


MYSTICAL AND ADOLESCENT CONVERSIONS 

w e have already described mystical conversion as the 
^change from an ordinarily religious life to the life of a 
religious mystic. By a mystic, we mean a person to 
whom the emotional religious experiences which occur 
at times to all religious persons have become stronger 
; and more permanent. He has other experiences differ¬ 
ing in many of their qualities from those of the ordinary 
religious person. The mystic is also much more liable to 
l have experiences which would be considered pathologi¬ 
cal by the doctor—visions, voices, trances, etc. These 
marks are sufficient to indicate, for the purpose of the 
present chapter, the kind of mentality covered by the 
word mystic. They are not intended to provide a defini¬ 
tion of mysticism. 

Although the development of the ordinary religious 
life frequently takes place without any abrupt change 
which can be described as conversion, this does not 
appear ever to be true in the case of the mystic. In the 
lives of them all there is one clearly defined event which 
they call their conversion. In the terms of our psycho¬ 
logical theory, this would seem to mean that in the 
passage from an irreligious life to a religious life repres¬ 
sion does not always play a part, while in the passage to 
the mystical life it does. The religious lives which de¬ 
velop without any sudden conversion we may suppose 
to be those in which the religious sentiment is integrated 
with the rest of the*mental life without having been first 
repressed. 


205 


206 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

In the lives of many religious mystics we find, as well 
as the mystical conversion, an earlier conversion which 
often takes the typical adolescent form. In others, we 
are told that the person was very religious from his 
childhood. Thus Pascal was first converted at the age 
of twenty-three, and his mystical conversion took place 
eight years later. Evan Roberts, the leader of the 
Welsh revival at the beginning of this century, was 
religious from his boyhood and devoted to prayer and 
the Bible. He was converted with soul anguish in 1904, 
and after that time he had paroxysms and saw visions. 
A1 Ghazzali, who was a professor of Theology (Moham¬ 
medan) at Baghdad, describes how, starting from dog¬ 
matic religion, he passed through a period of scepticism 
until he was redeemed by a light which God caused to 
penetrate into his heart, and afterwards he gave up his 
professorship and became a sufi. 1 

The accounts of mystical conversion are very strik¬ 
ingly more uniform than those which have so far been 
described. Typically, they are of a conventionally relig¬ 
ious person, living the usual life of the devout world, 
much respected for his piety and good works. He, how¬ 
ever, feels a restless yearning for something more than 
his life is giving him. He begins to cut himself free 
from the ties that bind him to the life to which he has 
been accustomed. Then, after a longer or shorter period 
of unhappiness due to a painful inner conflict, he passes 
through an experience which he is unable to describe, 
but which has given him a revelation in the light of 
which his subsequent life must be lived. After this time 
he separates himself completely from the world of men, 
and is absorbed in inner experiences of pain and of 
pleasure which are both equally unintelligible to others. 

1 The Confessions of Al Ghazzali , trans. by Claude Field. 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 207 

Instead of being universally respected, he becomes an 
object of scandal. He may even abandon valuable re¬ 
ligious work in the world for the sake of his new life . 1 
After the mystical conversion, his religious life has 
become much more highly coloured emotionally, has 
become intolerant in its demands on all other interests, 
and it has become definitely associated with such ab¬ 
normal mental phenomena as visions, locutions, etc. 

A case of mystical conversion which follows closely on 
the lines just indicated is that of Rulman Merswin. He 
was a wealthy, pious and respected merchant of Strass- 
burg. He retired from business in order to devote him¬ 
self to religious truth. One evening as he was strolling 
in his garden, meditating, a picture of the crucifix sud¬ 
denly presented itself to his mind. He was abruptly 
filled with a violent hatred of the world and his own 
free-will. “Lifting his eyes to heaven, he solemnly 
swore that he would utterly surrender his own will, 
person, and goods to the service of God.” 2 

The mystical conversion of Pascal is one which will 
repay a detailed attention. Less violent than the typi¬ 
cal case already given, it follows it closely in its general 
outlines. In her account of the life of Pascal, Madame 
Perier says: 

While he was not yet twenty-four years of age, the 
providence of God having caused an occasion which 
obliged him to read books of piety, God enlightened 
him in such a way by this reading, that he understood 
perfectly that the Christian religion obliges us to live 
only for God and to have no other object than Him; 

1 It must be remembered that this is only an account of the 
initial stage of the mystical life. It would be necessary to modify 
it if we were to take into account its later phases. 

2 Mysticism, by Evelyn Underhill, quoting Rulman Merswin, by 
A. Jundt. 


208 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


and this truth appeared to him so evident, so neces¬ 
sary, and so useful, that it ended all his researches: 
so that from that time he renounced all other branches 
of knowledge in order to apply himself entirely to the 
one thing which Jesus Christ calls needful . 1 

He had never been vicious or even sceptical in matters 
of religion. From this time he came under the influence 
of the Jansenists, whose outlook w r as puritanical. He 
dissuaded his younger sister, Jacqueline, from her pro¬ 
jected marriage on the ground that this would be rob¬ 
bing God of a part of what belonged to Him. At this 
time he became a chronic invalid, but he bore his suffer¬ 
ings with much resignation. The physicians ordered a 
complete cessation of intellectual work, and that every 
possible opportunity should be taken for relaxation and 
entertainment. At Auvergne he mixed freely with the 
world, but without any irregularity of life. He opposed 
his sister’s entry into a convent. His life and interests 
were becoming more and more secular. 

Somewhere about this time he composed his Dis¬ 
course on the Passions of Love. The Jansenists, who re¬ 
garded it as an imperfection that so great a man should 
have experienced human love, have left us little evi¬ 
dence concerning this event. The object of his love was 
probably Mile de Roannez, sister of Pascal’s friend, the 
Due de Roannez. She appears to have been a beautiful 
and accomplished woman. The difference in their rank 
must have made his attachment hopeless. Under his 
influence she became a novice in Port Royal, but re¬ 
turned to the world after his death. There can be little 
doubt that the deeply emotional nature of his subse¬ 
quent conversion was largely determined by his redirec¬ 
tion to Heaven of this earthly love. 

1 Vie de Blaise Pascal, by Mme. Perier, his sister. 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 209 

He says in the Discourse : 

Man does not like to dwell by himself; he loves, how¬ 
ever: he must seek, therefore, an object of love else¬ 
where. He can find it only in beauty. . . . The most 
suitable sustainer of beauty is a woman. When she 
has intellect, she animates and elevates it wonderfully. 
. . . Man alone is something imperfect; he must find 
another in order to be happy. He often seeks this in 
equality of condition, because freedom and opportunity 
for showing himself are then met more easily. Never¬ 
theless we sometimes go above ourselves, and we feel 
the fire burn higher, although we dare not tell her who 
has caused it. When we love a lady of unequal con¬ 
dition, ambition may accompany the beginning of 
love; but in a short time it becomes the master. It is 
a tyrant who suffers no companion. . . . The pleasure 
of loving without daring to tell has its pains, but it 
also has its sweetnesses. With what transport do we 
not form all our actions with the object of pleasing a 
person whom we esteem infinitely? 1 

But he felt dissatisfied with the things of the world. 
Htis sister, who was now a nun, often exhorted him to 
lead a more separated life, 

and finally did so with so much power and sweetness 
that she persuaded him as he had first persuaded her, 
absolutely to leave the world; so that he resolved to 
leave altogether all the intercourse of the world, and 
to cut off all the superfluities of life, even at the peril 
of his health, because he believed that salvation was 
preferable to all things. He was then thirty years 
old . 2 

1 “Discours sur les passions d« Tamour,” in Pensees, Fragments 
et Lettres de Blaise Pascal, by M. Prosper Faugere. 

3 Vie, by Mme Perier. 


210 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

The change, however, was not yet completed. His 
heart refused to obey his reason. He had learned to 
despise the world, but not to love God. He made pas¬ 
sionate efforts to redirect his will. But this change 
came only by degrees, as he learned that reason and 
practice were inadequate by themselves. Two events 
probably contributed to his final conversion. A car¬ 
riage accident took place, in which his life was endan¬ 
gered, and his weak state of health caused him to faint 
away. In November, 1654, he heard a sermon by M. 
Sinslin, in which the preacher insisted upon the neces¬ 
sity for entire surrender to God. Shortly after this, 
Pascal fell into a trance in which he had a very vivid 
impression of the presence of God, and seemed to be 
illuminated by a supernatural fire. He then took the 
decisive step of putting himself under the direction of 
M. de Saci of Port Royal. 

After his death, the following writing was found on 
a paper worn over his heart, and in a very slightly 
different form on a parchment. It is clearly a record of 
his conversion experience: 

L’an de grace 1654. Lundi 23 novembre, jour de St 
Clement, pape et martyr, et autres au martyrologe. 
Veille de St Chrysogone, martyr et autres. Depuis 
environ dix heures et demie du soir jusques environ 
minuit et demi, Feu. 

Dieu d’Abraham, Dieu d’Isaac, Dieu de Jacob. Non 
des philosophes et des savants. Certitude. Certitude. 
Sentiment. Joie. Paix. Dieu de Jesus-Christ. Deum 
meum et Deum vestrum. Ton Dieu sera mon Dieu— 
Oubli du monde et de tout hormis Dieu. II ne se trouve 
que par les voies enseignees dans l’Evangile. Grandeur 
de Fame humaine. Pere juste, le monde ne t’a point 
connu, mais je t’ai connu. Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie. 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 211 

Je m’en suis separe. Dereliquerunt me fontes aquae 
vivae. Mon Dieu me quitterez-vous? Que je n’en 
sois pas separe eternellement. 

Cette est la vie eternelle qu’ils te connaissent seul 
vrai Dieu et celui que tu as envoye J.-C. Jesus-Christ. 
Jesus-Christ. Je nFen suis separe; je l’ai fui, renonce, 
crucifie. Que je n’en sois jamais separe. II ne se con¬ 
serve que par les voies enseignees dans FEvangile. 
Renonciation totale et douce, etc. 1 

Before attempting a psychological explanation of 
mystical conversion, it will be well to try to give a psy¬ 
chological description of it. If we turn to the tradi¬ 
tional accounts of mystical conversion we find that the 
preliminary conflict is described as the struggle of the 
individual to renounce his own will and to submit him¬ 
self entirely to the will of God. The moment of his con¬ 
version is when, by Divine Grace, he is enabled to do 
this. His subsequent life is one lived entirely free from 
his own will. This freedom may be shown, and at the 
same time safeguarded for the Catholic by complete 
obedience to his director or to the superior of his com¬ 
munity. This is the significance of PascaFs expression: 
“Soumission totale a Jesus-Christ et a mon directeur.” 

This account clearly needs a certain amount of trans¬ 
lation into modern terms, its use of the word will is one 
which we have ceased to find useful. Let us study the 
conduct of the mystic engaged in his preliminary con¬ 
flict with the idea of finding out what he is actually sup¬ 
pressing. It is not merely what He regards as sin even 
of the most venial kind. He denies himself everything 

x Pensees, Fragments et Lettres de Blaise Pascal, by M. Prosper 
Faugere. The following additional words were found at the end 
of the parchment copy: “Soumission totale a Jesus-Christ et h 
mon directeur. Eternellement en joie pour un jour d’exercice sur 
la terre. Non obliviscar sermones tuos. Amen.” 


212 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

that ministers to his own desires—food, comfort and 
companionship. With particular severity he denies 
himself a luxury valued highly by even the most devout 
of ordinary religious persons, the good opinion of his 
fellow-men. He is trying to rid himself of all the desires 
which bind him to the outside world in order that he 
may be able more completely to direct the energy of his 
soul towards the one object of the religious sentiment. 
In order to express this with clearness, we need a term 
for that energy of the mind which is differentiated into 
particular desires, into hunger and love, and into the 
less immediately instinctive desires connected with such 
abstract sentiments as the love of knowledge or of fame. 
For this conception we shall use the word libido. 1 The^, 
mystic, then, is trying to divert his libido from the 
external world in order that he may direct it entirely to 
God. In order that he may accomplish this, he does 
violence to all his natural affections. He tries to destroy 
his love of comfort by scourging himself and fasting. 
He maltreats his self-regarding sentiment by allowing 
his body to become disfigured by neglect and dirt, and 
by deliberately acting in such a w T ay as to provoke the 
contempt of other persons. He shuts himself away from 
his fellow-men, so that he may not obtain pleasure from 
his gregarious instinct. 

Since human love makes more insistent demands on 
his libido than any other sentiment, it is the one he most 
sternly avoids. It seems probable, indeed, that the 
failure to find a satisfactory resting-place for his libido 


1 In all places where this word occurs, I shall be using it in the 
sense adopted by Jung, and not in the exclusively sexual sense 
of Freud. The libido of Jung is libido plus interest in the Freudian 
terminology. The word seems preferable to Jung’s own alternative 
■psychic energy, and elan, which has sometimes been used, has 
already been given a biological connotation by Bergson. 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 213 

in a human love object is often the determining incident 
which turns his feet into the path which leads to mysti¬ 
cal conversion. Pascal has left us a record of his own 
unsuccessful attempt to find happiness in human love in 
the work already quoted. St Catherine of Genoa and 
Mme Guyon were both extremely unhappy in their 
married lives before their mystical conversions. 

The explanation of the mystical conversion which I 
would suggest, is that it is the redirection of the whole 
of the libido into the religious sentiment. We may 
express this in other words by saying that it is the 
religious sublimation of the entire instinctive nature. 

We may notice here a curious feature which makes 
the records of mystical conversion singularly repellent 
even to readers who are themselves religious and, on the 
whole, sympathetic towards mysticism. This is the in¬ 
discriminate suppression of human activities which 
other people regard as good with those which are gen¬ 
erally considered bad. The convert of the ordinary type 
abandons drink and tries to lead a decent life. With his 
conversion we can sympathise. But when we find the 
mystical convert not merely treating his body with un¬ 
reasonable severity, but also abandoning all the decent 
and beautiful ties of human affection, and refusing to 
live a life of social and religious usefulness, we feel that 
this is something with which no reasonable person can 
have any sympathy. Yet the inner necessity which 
drives the mystic to these excesses is undoubtedly a 
reality for him. Suso and other mystics have felt the 
impulse to lead an ordinary, decent and respectable 
Christian life as one of their most subtle and dangerous 
temptations. For them it was clearly a choice between 
suppressing all activities which gave them pleasure and 
failing in the attainment of their goal. 


214 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

We may notice in passing that this tendency is by no 
means confined to the religious mystic. Persons who 
have consecrated the whole of their libido to other 
activities show the same peculiarity. Scientific research 
workers often show the same indifference to the de¬ 
mands of natural affection. Suso’s temptation to lead 
an ordinarily useful and respectable religious life might 
be exactly paralleled by the research worker’s tempta¬ 
tion to leave the investigations interesting to him for 
the sake of doing work which is not only socially valu¬ 
able, but is also sufficiently remunerative to enable him 
to marry and live in comfort. His answer to the temp¬ 
tation is the same as Suso’s. He feels that if he were to 
yield to it he would be selling his soul. Other people 
have no more sympathy with him than they have with 
the religious mystic. 

An interesting example of the tendency to repress 
good and bad desires indiscriminately has been brought 
to the notice of the present writer by a doctor. It is a 
case of ordinary adult, not mystical, conversion. A man 
who drank excessively, but lived on affectionate terms 
with his wife and family, became converted by a relig¬ 
ious organisation. He gave up drink and became an 
active worker in this religious body; but he abandoned 
his wife and children, and made them an entirely insuffi¬ 
cient allowance, so that they were reduced to poverty. 
Two years later he lapsed, took to drink again, but re¬ 
turned to his wife and family, supported them, and 
behaved in his usual affectionate way towards them. A 
few months later, he was again converted. He an¬ 
nounced his intention of giving up his occupation and 
living on the very small pay of an official of the religious 
organisation which had converted him. He refused to 
support his wife and family any longer and said they 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 215 

were living in sin. He sold his house over their heads 
and they were left destitute. Meanwhile, he behaved as 
a very efficient worker for his religious organisation. 
They thought highly of him, knowing, of course, noth¬ 
ing of his domestic affairs. He preached and organised 
their work for a district with conspicuous success. 

We have here, in a simple form, an example of that 
repression of desires which are commonly regarded as 
good with those which are recognised as evil, which 
becomes so marked in mystical conversion. With the 
possibility of its moral justification, we are not, as psy¬ 
chologists, concerned. We have emphasised this feature 
because it is one which tends to be slurred over by works 
on mysticism. It must be considered if we are to under¬ 
stand mystical conversion. A more detailed discussion 
of its psychological meaning may conveniently be de¬ 
ferred until the remaining kind of religious conversion 
has been dealt with. 

It would, no doubt, be possible to find cases of the 
forms of conversion discussed in the last chapter taking 
place at adolescence, but there seems no reason for sup¬ 
posing that they are commoner at the period of adoles¬ 
cence than at any other age. At the same time, there is 
a kind of conversion which has certain well-marked 
characters of its own, which appears to occur only some¬ 
where in the neighbourhood of adolescence, and it is to 
this that I propose to give the name of adolescent con¬ 
version. This is the only kind of conversion which has 
been considered at all by most of the writers on the 
subject. Starbuck has shown, as the result of an elab¬ 
orate statistical enquiry, that a large majority of the 
total number of religious conversions take place be¬ 
tween the ages of twelve and twenty-five. The law 
which he develops is that conversion tends to take place 


216 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

between the periods of maximum physical change in 
puberty. 

A comparison with those of adults shows that adoles¬ 
cent conversions have certain peculiar features. These 
are: 

(a) A tendency to follow conventional lines in the 
event itself and in descriptions of it. 

( b ) A uniform exaggeration of preconversion sin 
and an equal exaggeration of post-conversion virtue. 

(c) A larger number of adolescent conversions seem 
to be the result of preaching. 

( d ) In a large number of cases the change is not a 
very permanent one. 

Before discussing the significance of these differences, 
we will give a brief account of a fairly typical adolescent 
conversion. The one chosen is the conversion of Wil¬ 
liam Booth, described in the Life by Harold Begbie. In 
taking a case in which the redirection was permanent 
and so extraordinarily fruitful, we are to some extent 
departing from type. This departure, however, is ne¬ 
cessitated by the difficulty of finding the more common 
transient changes recorded with sufficient detail. 

Looking back on his preconversion days, General 
Booth exclaimed: “I have often wondered that I did 
not go straight to hell.” It seems clear that he is re¬ 
proaching himself for no worse fault than that of being 
a high-spirited leader in the games of the boys of the 
village and being indifferent to higher things, for he 
also declares: “I have heard my mother say that I never 
caused her an hour’s real anxiety in her life.” 

There was no religious atmosphere in his home, but 
he used to go as a child to the parish church, which, 
however, made no particular impression on him. His 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 217 

first religious impression was of the Separate and relig¬ 
ious” life of a cousin; and he was haunted by a remark 
this cousin made to him: “Religion is something that 
comes to you from the outside of you.” He also records 
that at one time he was much affected by the hymn, 
“Here we suffer grief and pain.” Both of these impres¬ 
sions faded, and he says that he settled down to the 
utmost indifference. However, he felt an inward dis¬ 
satisfaction with his condition. “My heart,” he says, 
“was a blank.” 

His early life was overshadowed by the financial 
trouble of his family. Then suddenly they were 
plunged into poverty by his father’s complete ruin. 
Instead of being made into a gentleman as his father 
had hoped, the boy was sent into a pawnbroker’s shop— 
an event which caused him lasting shame. This hap¬ 
pened at the age of thirteen. Little impression seems to 
have been made on him by the subsequent death of his 
father and his death-bed repentance. From this time, 
however, he began to be interested in religion and to 
attend chapel. He began to realise the superiority of 
the religious life over the purely worldly existence he 
had lived for fourteen years, and a hunger sprang up for 
it. “I wanted,” he says, “to be right with God. I wanted 
to be right in myself. I wanted a life spent in putting 
other people right.” He seems always to have had 
what he regarded as an instinctive belief in God even 
during his worldly childhood. 

While this unhappiness and the sense of the reality of 
God were deepening in his soul, he devoted himself with 
zeal to the interests of his employer. He meant to get 
on in the world. He also became interested in political 
reform, and his sympathy with the poor was shown by 
his adherence to the Chartists. 


218 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

The condition of the suffering people around me— 
people with whom I had been so long familiar, and 
whose agony seemed to reach its climax about this 
time—undoubtedly affected me very deeply. 

During the year of his conversion, he saw children cry¬ 
ing for bread in the streets of Nottingham. 

In his sixteenth year, he determined to make the 
surrender of personality , which precedes conversion. 
He was held back by the memory of a sin. In a boyish 
trading affair he had managed to make a profit out of 
his companions. They, supposing all to have been done 
in the way of generous fellowship, had given him a silver 
pencil-case as a token of their gratitude. It would not 
have been difficult to have returned the case, but he 
could not bring himself to confess the deception of 
which he had been guilty. He suddenly made a resolu¬ 
tion to end the matter, rushed out to the person chiefly 
wronged, acknowledged what he had done, and re¬ 
turned the pencil-case. He felt that the guilty burden 
had rolled away from his heart, and that peace had come 
in its place. This was the moment of his conversion. 
He was happy, but he says that he had no experience of 
emotional religion. 

I felt . . . that I could willingly and joyfully travel 
to the ends of the earth for Jesus Christ, and suffer 
anything imaginable to help the souls of other men. 
“Rather than yearning for the world’s pleasures,” he 
says, “books, gains, or recreations, I found my nature 
leading me to come away from it all. It had lost all 
charm for me. What were all the novels, even those 
of Sir Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, compared with 
the story of my Saviour? What were the choicest 
orators compared with Paul? What was the hope of 



MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 219 

my money-earning, even with all my desire to help 
my poor mother and sisters, in comparison with the 
imperishable wealth of ingathered souls? I soon be¬ 
gan to despise everything that the world had to offer 
me.” 

As a record of the actual life of the boy at this time— 
though not, indeed, of his later life—this is undoubtedly 
exaggerated. He still continued to be the cleverest and 
most dependable of his employer’s staff. 

This account of the conversion experiences of General 
Booth is an illustration of the tendency of the process to 
follow a conventional path. Most of the essential fea¬ 
tures of the story could be paralleled in any other narra¬ 
tive of an adolescent conversion. There is, in addition, 
the characteristic exaggeration of the state of sinfulness 
before the conversion and of the state of virtue after it. 
I have often wondered that I did not go straight to hell 
is an expression of self-condemnation which could not 
have been justified from the point of view of an outside 
observer. Nor was there probably more justification 
for describing his emotional attitude after his conver¬ 
sion as a despising of all that the world had to offer him. 
Both of these points can be seen more clearly, however, 
when we study, not a single conversion record, but a 
series of them, such as that found in Starbuck’s Psychol¬ 
ogy of Religion. With a monotony which becomes 
wearisome we find subject after subject describing the 
same experience in the same conventional language. 
This is, no doubt, partly due to a process of convention¬ 
alisation which takes place in thought after the event 
itself; but it probably also points to a uniformity in the 
actual experiences of the event. 

We find, too, in Starbuck’s book, that his subjects 
consistently tend to describe their condition before con- 


220 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

version in language which would be strong if it were 
used of a hardened criminal instead of a child; and their 
state after conversion in language which could only be 
applied accurately to the strictly separated life of a 
saint. For example, a male convert of sixteen says: 

Before conversion my mind was in a state of great 
anxiety. The fleshly mind was all aflame, and my 
guilt was hideous to me. Because I belonged to church 
I felt myself a hypocrite. 

A female convert says of her state after conversion: 

I was a new creature in Christ Jesus. Everything 
seemed heavenly rather than earthly; everything was 
so lovely. I had a love for everybody. It was such a 
blessed experience! Going home I walked on the curb¬ 
stone rather than walk or talk with ungodly people. 

There seems to be no reason to dismiss these ten¬ 
dencies as mere verbal exaggerations for the purpose of 
edification, although this factor undoubtedly plays a 
part, particularly when conversion experiences have 
been recorded for publication. There appear to be also 
real emotional experiences which are expressed in such 
exaggerations. jThe tendency to exaggeration of post¬ 
conversion virtue is probably little more than the nat¬ 
ural difference, in judging a highly emotional state, be¬ 
tween the point of view of the subject himself and other 
persons. The subject judges himself introspectively, 
and is mainly influenced by the rich emotional content 
of his desire for a new life. Other persons judge him 
from the point of view of observers of his behavior, and 
find very little better in his life and even a certain 
amount that seems to them worse. The exaggeration of 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 221 

preconversion vice is probably the more important of 
the two. The above quotation from Starbuck suggests 
what I believe to be the true explanation—that it is an 
expression of a morbid horror of the growing sex-instinct 
(due, no doubt, in part to unwise teaching). 

Certain of the features which have been described as 
typical of adolescent conversion seem to point to the 
fact that in them suggestion plays a large part, and that 
they are not, as were the cases previously considered, 
mainly products of the individual's own self-determined 
mental life. If this were the case, it would explain the 
tendency of adolescent conversion to follow a well- 
defined course as well as its dependence on preaching 
and its tendency to impermanence. But though the 
effects of suggestion may play a large part in adolescent 
conversion, it would appear to be unsound to dismiss the 
process as merely a result of suggestion. Although sug¬ 
gestion undoubtedly helps to determine the form and 
even the occurrence of mental events, ;there is no reason 
for supposing that it could ever originate such a process 
as conversion, unless there were already in the mind a 
conflict which predisposed it to conversion. Moreover, 
the uniformity of the descriptions of adolescent con¬ 
versions may not be entirely due to the influence of 
suggestion, but may be the same as that postulated for 
a similar uniformity in mystical conversions—the fact 
that they are the result of a single and uniform conflict. 

Many of the writers on this subject have been satis¬ 
fied with the explanation that adolescent conversion is 
the normal psychic change at this age which has been 
given a religious colouring. This normal mental change 
is essentially a change from a system of sentiments in 
which the principal object is the self to a system in 
which other people occupy the larger part of the indi- 


222 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

viduaks interest. Thus, the awakening of the sex-life is 
accompanied by a large development of altruistic senti¬ 
ment, in addition to that concerned with the search for 
a particular love object. Such writers as Starbuck seem 
to think that conversion is simply the awakening of 
these altruistic sentiments, and that the sense of sin 
which accompanies conversion is the revulsion from the 
previous egocentric life. 

This is no doubt true, but it does not seem to be ade¬ 
quate. The new orientation towards the external world 
which accompanies adolescence and is characterised by 
the birth of the disinterested emotions and sentiments 
certainly finds its expression in the new religion of the 
adolescent, so this element plays a part in adolescent 
conversion. But the religious sentiment is not merely 
altruism, although an increase of altruistic feeling ordi¬ 
narily accompanies its awakening. It is essentially the 
redirection of the energy of the soul towards God, and 
unless this redirection accompanies conversion, it is 
merely an ethical crisis and not a religious one. 

I Moreover, the characteristic features of the conver¬ 
sion change in adult conversions were traced back to a 
conflict due to a repression. It is therefore reasonable 
to look for a similar mechanism in adolescent conver¬ 
sion. There is one repression which normally accom¬ 
panies adolescence, and that is the repression of .the 
growing sex-instinct (or love instinct) itself. Under the 
conditions of ordinary civilised life it is not usual for 
this instinct to find its satisfaction at this time in a real 
love object. It therefore leads an underground exist¬ 
ence in the realm of phantasy thinking, and it may be 
more completely repressed by the morbid horror of sex 
to which reference has already been made. This re¬ 
pressed instinct may become pathogenic and find an 


MYSTICAL CONVERSIONS 223 

outlet in perverted behaviour or in neurotic symptoms. 
It may, on the other hand, be sublimated— i.e. the 
energy of the repressed instinct may be directed into 
channels in which it becomes valuable, such as intellec¬ 
tual work, art or religion. The conversion of adoles¬ 
cence appears to be simply the sudden solution of this 
conflict, at least temporarily, by the sublimation of the 
repressed love instinct into religious channels. The in¬ 
stinct gives the qualities of its own emotions to the re¬ 
ligious feelings wdiich spring from it, hence the emo¬ 
tional intensity which is characteristic of adolescent 
religion. 

It is interesting to notice in this connection that, in 
the youthful religious conflicts of Blessed Henry Suso, 
he is drawn to his object under the form of an erotic 
phantasy. 

He had from his youth up a loving heart. Now the 
Eternal Wisdom is represented in Holy Scripture under 
a lovely guise as a gracious loving mistress, who dis¬ 
plays her charms with the intent to please everyone; 
discoursing the while tenderly, in female form, of the 
desire she has to win all hearts to herself, and saying 
how deceitful all other mistresses are and how truly 
loving and constant she is. This drew his young soul 
to her . . . and he began to feel a yearning in his 
loving soul, and thoughts would come to him like 
these: Truly thou shouldst make trial of thy fortune, 
whether perchance this high mistress, of whom thou 
hast heard tell such marvels, will become thy love; for 
in truth thy wild young heart cannot long remain 
without a love. 1 

If we compare our conclusions on the psychological 

1 The Life of Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, trans. by T. F. 

Knox, chap. iv. 


224 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


processes at work in adolescent conversion with those 
we reached in discussing mystical conversion, we find 
that the principal difference between them is the more 
extended nature of the disturbance in the latter. Both 
are the result of sublimation of the libido into religious 
channels; but in mystical conversion it is not only that 
part of the libido specialised in the sex-instinct that is 
sublimated, but the whole of the libido employed in the 
activities and affections of this-world life. A possible 
explanation of this difference is that in later life differ¬ 
ent sentiments .become associated together in such a 
way that energy cannot be withdrawn from one without 
at the same time being withdrawn from others. The 
case quoted of the converted drunkard may be regarded 
as an intermediate one between mystical and ordinary 
adult conversion. The disturbance of the convert’s dis¬ 
tribution of libido is less than it would be in a typical 
mystical conversion; but, on the other hand, he cannot 
suppress his desire for drink without at the same time 
suppressing his love for his wife and family. 


CHAPTER XV 


MYSTICISM 

I do not propose to devote a very great space to the 
consideration of mysticism. The subject has already 
been written on so largely that a heavy responsibility 
rests on anyone who would increase that vast volume. 
The phenomena of mysticism (like those of conversion) 
are striking, and it has been found easier to interest peo¬ 
ple in them than in the more obscure, but at least 
equally important, psychological problems connected 
with the religion of ordinary persons. For this reason, 
the psychological study of religion has become in a 
great measure simply the study of mysticism and of 
conversion. Of the literature of religious mysticism, the 
student of religion should be acquainted with the fol¬ 
lowing works: The Mystical Element of Religion, by 
Baron F. von Hiigel; Etudes d’histoire et de psychologie 
du Mysticisme, by Professor Henri Delacroix; 1 The 
Graces of Interior Prayer, by Fr. Poulain; and the last 
chapters of The Religious Consciousness, by Professor 
J. Bissett Pratt, to mention only a few books of out¬ 
standing importance. I will be content to give a very 
brief outline of the phenomena of religious mysticism 
and of the schemes of classification which have been 
proposed for them. 

Few words have been used with such a bewildering 
variety of meanings as mysticism. There are at least 
five meanings in common use, and some writers use sev- 

1 Paris, 1908. 

225 


226 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

eral of these in the course of one chapter without any 
indication of their differences. To avoid this confusion, 
it is necessary to decide in what sense we shall use it and 
to be consistent in that use. It is not necessary to main¬ 
tain that our use of it is in any sense the one right use. 
I propose to adopt the same usage as such Roman Cath¬ 
olic writers as Poulain, to whom a mystic is a person 
who experiences a particular kind of mental prayer. 
This is practically a convenient criterion for mysticism, 
since the experience of these modes of prayer is accom¬ 
panied by other well marked changes. The most notable 
of these is the peculiar dominance of the religious senti¬ 
ment which is ushered in by the mental change we have 
called mystical conversion. Moreover, at about this 
stage of spiritual development, visions and locutions 
tend to make their appearance. 

Several varieties of mystical prayer have been dis¬ 
tinguished, but it is convenient to have a name for the 
mental state which is characteristic of them all, and to 
this state we apply the name contemplation. Again, it 
is necessary to notice that the word has had a large 
number of other meanings which we will not discuss. 
Contemplation is described by the mystics themselves 
as “the ineffable perception of God,” “the experimental 
knowledge of God’s in-dwelling and presence within 
us,” and as the “direct apprehension of God.” Such lan¬ 
guage makes us think of a form of the prayer of simplic¬ 
ity in which the object of contention is the idea of the 
presence of God. If we examine the mystics’ accounts 
of their states more carefully, however, we shall find 
that this is not an adequate account of them. The in¬ 
trospective account of the sense, of the presence of God 
in contemplation shows it to be different from anything 
that is ever experienced in the prayer of simplicity. It 


MYSTICISM 227 

is described as a possession, or at least as a perception, 
to distinguish it from the non-mystical experience which 
appears to its subject to be more of the nature of think¬ 
ing about the presence of God. Ineffable perception, 
experimental knowledge and direct apprehension would 
not have been used to describe the experience of the 
prayer of simplicity. This does not mean that in con¬ 
templation the experience is more clear than in the 
prayer of simplicity. On the contrary, the passage from 
the prayer of simplicity to the early stages of mystical 
prayer is often described in terms which make it clear 
that it has appeared to the person experiencing it as a 
passage from clear thinking to a very confused percep¬ 
tion. It is for this reason that the words darkness and 
night are often used of the experience of mystical 
prayer. 

A second difference which has already been briefly 
mentioned is the comparative absence of voluntary con¬ 
trol over even the earliest stages of mystical prayer. We 
saw that the prayer of simplicity could be entered into 
or left voluntarily without any difficulty at all. Con¬ 
templation may begin and end without any action of the 
person experiencing it, and quite unexpectedly. If a 
person experiencing contemplation wishes to emerge 
from the state because it is interfering with necessary 
activities, he is unable to do so by merely directing his 
attention to other things. He has to make vigorous bod¬ 
ily movements and to walk up and down. In the later 
stages he is unable even to do this, since the power of 
bodily movement may be completely suspended. Sadhu 
Sundar Singh describes the care he must exercise lest he 
should slip into ecstasy while he is working in cities, and 
wishes to be able to address public meetings. 

A third difference is the suspension of certain kinds 


228 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

of activity in contemplation. Even in the earliest 
stages, any effort of directed thinking becomes ex¬ 
tremely difficult; such effort, for example, as the recita¬ 
tion of the words of a prayer. This difficulty is known 
to Roman writers as the ligature. 

There have been many different classifications of 
mystical states. There is first the three-fold classifica¬ 
tion of the way of purgation, of illumination and of 
union. This has the advantage of simplicity, but it 
seems to have been used with considerable differences 
of meaning. Scaramelli, in his Direttorio Mistico, which 
has been published in a much abridged English edition, 
gives a long and detailed list of different states, many of 
which do not appear to be really specifically different. 
The classification I intend to adopt is that found in St 
Teresa’s Interior Castle, which is followed by Father 
Poulain in The Graces of Interior Prayer. The great 
merit of St Teresa’s classification is that it proceeds 
from clearly distinguishable psychological points of dif¬ 
ference. The stages she distinguishes are: the prayer of 
quiet, the prayer of union, ecstasy and the spiritual 
marriage. 

The prayer of quiet is the first stage of mystical 
prayer. All that I said when speaking of contemplation 
generally will be true of the prayer of quiet in particu¬ 
lar. This stage of mystical prayer differs from the later 
ones in the extent to which other mental functions are 
interfered with by the contemplation. It is described as 
the fifth mansion of St Teresa’s Interior Castle. This 
state of prayer usually occurs to a person who has 
reached the stage at which his meditations have become 
the prayer of simplicity. At first it comes for only a few 
seconds, but later may stay many hours, even con¬ 
tinuing during physical activity. The contemplation is 


MYSTICISM 229 

accompanied by distractions—images and thoughts 
which do not belong to the contemplation; and the 
power of making bodily movements is not lost, although 
movement usually results in the loss of the state. 

St Teresa describes the prayer of quiet as follows: 

In the prayer of quiet, when the water flows from 
the spring itself and not through conduits, the mind 
ceases to act; it is forced to do so, although it does not 
understand what is happening, and so wanders hither 
and thither in bewilderment, finding no place for rest. 
Meanwhile the will, entirely united to God, is much 
disturbed by the tumult of the thoughts: no notice, 
however, should be taken of them, or they would cause 
a loss of a great part of the favour the soul is enjoy¬ 
ing. Let the spirit ignore these distractions and aban¬ 
don itself in the arms of divine love. 1 

The next stage distinguished by St Teresa is the 
prayer of union. This is intermediate between the 
prayer of quiet and ecstasy. The emotional experience 
is more intense, distractions are absent, but neither the 
power of voluntary movement nor sense perception is 
lost. St Teresa thus describes it: 

In the prayer of union the soul is asleep, fast asleep, 
as regards the world and itself: in fact, during the 
short time this state lasts it is deprived of all feeling 
whatever, being unable to think on any subject, even 
if it wished. No effort is needed here to suspend the 
thoughts: if the soul can love—it knows not how, nor 
whom it loves, nor what it desires. In fact, it has 
died to this world, to live more truly than ever in God. 2 

She goes on to say that although disturbing thoughts 
may be found in the prayer of quiet, they are never 

1 The Interior Castle, 4. HI. 7. 2 Ibid. 5. I. 5. 



230 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

found here, “for neither the imagination, the under¬ 
standing, nor the memory has power to hinder the 
graces bestowed in it.” 1 

The next stage, that of ecstasy, is one which has 
attracted much more attention than these earlier con¬ 
ditions of mystical prayer, since it has striking bodily 
effects which excited the wonder of the contemporaries 
of ecstatics and of the writers of their lives. Ecstasy is 
accompanied by complete loss of the capacity to receive 
sense impressions, and of the power of making volun¬ 
tary movements (in other words, the body remains in a 
cataleptic, condition). It is stated that the only excep¬ 
tion to this is that an order given to the ecstatic by his 
spiritual superior is obeyed. 2 Ecstasy is a state which 
comes on occasionally while the subject is experiencing 
a less intense form of contemplation. It is in this con¬ 
dition that visions and locutions generally take place. 
The introspective accounts of ecstasy differ from those 
already given principally in the greater clearness of the 
object which is felt to be perceived, and in its more 
intense emotional accompaniment. 

As an example of ecstasy, we may take a present-day 
description given by the Sadhu Sundar Singh. 3 “No 
words are spoken,” he says, “but I see all pictured ;<• in a 
moment problems are solved, easily and with pleasure, 
and with no burden to my brain.” In his earlier days 
as a Christian, ecstasy was a comparatively rare occur¬ 
rence. Later, although he did not know beforehand 
when he would enter into it, it became an almost every- 
1 Op. cit. 5. i. 5. 

''’This fact has been compared with the receptivity of the hypno¬ 
tised subject to the commands of his hypnotiser when he seems 
oblivious of all other sense impressions, but it would seem to be a 
rash conclusion that the hypnotic trance is physiologically the same 
condition as that of ecstasy. 

* The Sadhu, by Streeter and Appasamy, pp. 133, 134 and 136. 


MYSTICISM 


231 


day experience, unless he held it back. Ecstasy com¬ 
monly ensues after about twenty minutes of prayer and 
meditation. In this state, which sometimes lasts for sev¬ 
eral hours, he loses all perception of the external world; 
and he has no sense of the lapse of time. Once, during an 
ecstasy, he was stung all over with hornets, but he had 
felt nothing. While in ecstasy, he thinks on such themes 
as the love of God, and at the same time l he says that 
he listens to spirits, especially the Holy Spirit, as they 
talk to him. An interesting fact in connection with the 
ecstasy of the Sadhu is that he had practised Yoga 
before his conversion to Christianity. He says: 

the great contrast between the state of ecstasy and the 
Yogic states which I cultivated before becoming a 
Christian lies in the fact that in Ecstasy there is always 
the same feeling of calm satisfaction and being at 
home, whatever had been my state of mind before 
going into Ecstasy. Whereas in the Yogic state, if 
before the trance I was feeling sad, I used to weep in 
the trance, if cheerful I would smile. 

St Teresa says: 

. . . when He intends ravishing the soul He takes 
away the power of speech, and although occasionally 
the other faculties are retained rather longer, no word 
can be uttered. Sometimes the person is at once de¬ 
prived of all the senses, the hands and body becoming 
as cold as if the soul had fled; occasionally no breath¬ 
ing can be detected. This condition lasts but a short 
while; I mean in the same degree, for when this pro¬ 
found suspension diminishes the body seems to come 
to itself and gain strength to return again to this death 
which gives more vigorous life to the soul. This 
supreme state of ecstasy never lasts long, but although 


232 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

it ceases, it leaves the will so inebriated, and the mind 
so transported out of itself that for a day, or sometimes 
for several days, such a person is incapable of attend¬ 
ing to anything but what excites the will to the love 
of God. 1 

The Spiritual Marriage is not an intensification of the 
experience of ecstasy as each of the stages of prayer 
already mentioned has been in some sense an intensi¬ 
fication of the experience of the previous one. On the 
contrary, the trances of the ecstatic state disappear 
completely or nearly completely in this stage, as do also 
the imaginal visions which are a common accompani¬ 
ment of ecstasy. At the same time, the state of contem¬ 
plation, instead of being intermittent as hitherto, 
becomes permanent. There is also a strong impulsion 
to active work, which is in marked contrast with the 
tendency to abandon activity which is characteristic of 
the early stages of the mystical life. 

St Teresa says that she is 

astonished at seeing that when the soul arrives at this 
state it does not go into ecstasies except perhaps on 
rare occasions—even then they are not like the former 
trances and the flight of the spirit and seldom take 
place in public as they did before. 2 

The permanent intellectual vision she enjoyed dur¬ 
ing this state is thus described: 

By some mysterious manifestation of the truth, the 
three Persons of the most Blessed Trinity reveal them¬ 
selves, preceded by an illumination which shines on 
the spirit like a most dazzling cloud of light. The 

1 The Interior Castle, 6. iv. 17 and 18. 

3 Ibid. 7. m. 10. 


MYSTICISM 233 

three Persons are distinct from one another; a sublime 
knowledge is infused into the soul, imbuing it with a 
certainty of the truth that the Three are of one sub¬ 
stance, power, and knowledge and are one God. Thus 
that which we hold as a doctrine of faith, the soul now, 
so to speak, understands by sight, though it beholds 
the Blessed Trinity neither by the eyes of the body 
nor of the soul, this being no imaginary vision. 1 

Of the impulsion to activity, she says: 

The most surprising thing to me is that the sorrow and 
distress which such souls felt because they could not 
die and enjoy our Lord’s presence are now exchanged 
for as fervent a desire of serving Him, of causing Him 
to be praised, and of helping others to the utmost of 
their power. 2 

This impulsion to activity is much more strongly 
emphasised by Mme Guyon in her description of her 
apostolic state, which is generally regarded as equiva¬ 
lent to the Spiritual Marriage of St Teresa. 

There is also in this condition what appears to its 
subject as a division of the soul by which distracting 
conflicts may consciously occupy the mind without dis¬ 
turbing the peace of the contemplation. Of this, St 
Teresa says: 

Thus in a manner her soul appeared divided: a short 
time after God had done her this favour, while under¬ 
going great sufferings, she complained of her soul as 
Martha did of Mary, reproaching it with enjoying 
solitary peace while leaving her so full of troubles and 
occupations that she could not keep it company. 3 

1 Op. cit. 7. i. 9. 3 Ibid. 7. m. 5. 

3 Ibid. 7. i. 14. In this passage the authoress is referring to 
herself. 


234 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 
And in the next chapter: 

It is not intended that the powers, senses and passions 
should continually enjoy this peace. The soul does so, 
indeed, but in the other mansions there are still times 
of struggle, suffering, and fatigue, though as a general 
rule, peace is not lost by them . . . though tumults 
and wild beasts rage with great uproar in the other 
mansions, yet nothing of this enters the seventh man¬ 
sion, nor drives the soul from it. 1 

Mme Guyon also describes a condition of automatism 
in which actions cease to be under the control of the 
conscious will and seem to be directly under the control 
of God. In her Torrents she writes: 

II faut se laisser posseder, agir, mouvoir sans resis¬ 
tance, demeurer dans son etat naturel et de consistance, 
attendant tous les moments, et les recevant de la Provi¬ 
dence sans rien augmenter ni diminuer, se laissant 
conduire a tout sans vue, ni raison, ni sans y penser; 
mais comme par entrainement, sans penser a ce qui est 
de meilleur et de plus par fait, mais se laissant aller 
comme naturellement a tout cela, demeurant dans 
l’etat egal et de consistance ou Dieu l’a mise, sans se 
mettre en peine de rien faire; mais laissant a Dieu le 
soin de faire naitre les occasions et de les executer. 2 

St Teresa, like the other more orthodox mystics, 
makes much less of this condition of automatism, prob¬ 
ably being saved from its exaggeration by the greater 
virility of her character. She hints, however, at an ap¬ 
proach to the same state when she says: . . our 

Lord . . . told her that henceforth she was to care for 

1 Op. cit. 7. ii. 14. The Seventh Mansion, in this work, is the 
state of Spiritual Marriage. 

2 Etudes d’histoire et de psychologie du Mysticisme. H. Delacroix, 
p. 144. 


MYSTICISM 


235 

His affairs as though they were her own and He would 
care for hers.” 1 She, like Mme Guyon, seems to have 
written many of her books in a condition of automatism. 

It should be clear that it is extremely unjust to mys¬ 
ticism to suppose that it is merely, or even primarily, 
a system of emotional experiences pursued as such by 
the mystic. A character of the mystical states of prayer, 
which is strongly insisted upon by such writers as St 
Teresa, is the growth in the virtues, in humility, in the 
Love of God and in spiritual fruitfulness found in the 
soul experiencing them. It is, in part, this growth which 
is used by the director of the religious person as a 
criterion to distinguish between what he regards as 
genuinely religious experiences and their diabolical 
counterfeits. Mysticism, like any other highly emo¬ 
tional system of experiences (as, for example, human 
love), may, indeed, be followed in such a way that the 
emotional experiences become ends in themselves. This, 
however, is the way of spiritual death which we find the 
historical mystics strenuously trying to avoid. Those 
who take this path degenerate into merely silly religious 
sentimentalists. These are probably at least as numer¬ 
ous as the greater mystics, only their names do not sur¬ 
vive, because other religious people find nothing of 
value in their writings. The avoidance of this path is 
partly provided for by the exterior penances of the 
religious mystics, partly by characters inherent to the 
mystic process itself. 

These characters are what are called trials in mystical 
theology. These are the painful aspects of the mystical 
states of prayer. These are so uniform that it is possible 
to describe the process of advance in mystical prayer in 
terms of its painful aspect alone. This is what is done 

1 The Interior Castle, 7. n. 1. 


236 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

by St John of the Cross in his Dark Night of the Soul. 
It is a serious misunderstanding of his meaning to sup¬ 
pose that St John’s Night of the Senses and Night of 
the Spirit are two additional mental states which must 
be interpolated somewhere between the states described 
by other mystics in order to give a complete account 
of the stages of progress in mystical prayer. There is, 
of course, a certain amount of artificiality in attempting 
to correlate exactly the stages of one mystic with those 
of another. A very considerable correspondence, how¬ 
ever, is to be found in the conditions described by dif¬ 
ferent mystics, and an examination of those of St John 
of the Cross shows that in the first night he is describing 
the passage from ordinary mental prayer to the prayer 
of simplicity, and in the second night the stages of mys¬ 
tical prayer which precede ecstasy. 

We will now consider what can be said about the 
mystic states from the point of view of psychology. It 
was pointed out in connection with mystical conversion 
that the convert was engaged in trying to detach his 
libido from the outside world. This attitude towards 
the outside world has been studied by Dr Jung in con¬ 
nection with certain of the psychoses and he has given 
to it the name introversion. He distinguishes two types 
of men: the introvert who has withdrawn libido from 
the external world and is interested mainly in thought, 
and the extrovert who is interested in things, in action 
in the outside world, and in feeling rather than thought. 
He also applies the words introversion and extroversion 
to the ways of disposing of the libido characteristic of 
the introvert and extrovert, respectively. These two at¬ 
titudes towards life may be characteristic of different 
phases of the existence of a single person. Introversion 
is liable to be determined by failure to find satisfaction 


MYSTICISM 


237 


in the outside world. A feeling of inferiority due to some 
physical defect or a failure to find happiness in love may 
drive a person to seek for happiness in the creations of 
his own mind, and thus to become an introvert. 

An extreme form of introversion is found in the very 
common form of insanity known as dementia praecox. 
In this disease the patient has lost all interest in the 
outside world and appears to live entirely in a world 
of day-dreams. Degenerative brain and other physical 
changes take place, and the disease ends in profound 
dementia. It is now stated, however, by the followers 
of Dr Jung, that dementia praecox can be treated in its 
early stages by purely psychical means, and if the 
patient can be made to extrovert his libido, the de¬ 
generative changes do not take place. Hysteria is re¬ 
garded as a similar regressive form of extroversion. 

Is it a satisfactory account of the mystical conversion 
to say that the subject is introverting libido? Intro¬ 
version has been used for a long time as a term in 
mystical theology, although it would be perilous to 
assume that it has meant the same thing as it does to 
Dr Jung. Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, describes a 
movement of the soul as “an introversion (17 els eavrrjv 
e’iaodos ) from things without/’ 1 Clearly the attitude to¬ 
wards the external world in the initial stages of the 
mystical conversion is that of introversion. It is pos¬ 
sible, however, that the fact that libido is directed 
towards an object which is, at any rate believed in by 
the mystic as an external reality, introduces an essen¬ 
tial difference into the process. Possibly we ought to 
coin a word, and speak of deoversion. This process, as 
found in the greater mystics, appears to be related 
rather to the health-giving introversion described by the 
1 The Divine Names, chap. iv. para. 9. 


238 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


analytical psychologists than to the regressive introver¬ 
sion of dementia praecox. It is followed by a phase of 
extroversion in the Spiritual Marriage, in which the 
mental growth during the earlier phase is made profit¬ 
able for work in the outside world. 

Of preanalytic studies of mysticism from the point 
of view of mental pathology, there is a considerable 
literature. The resemblance between some of the phe¬ 
nomena of mysticism and the symptoms of hysteria 
could not fail to attract attention. Janet studied an 
ecstatic at the Salpetriere and concluded that she was a 
scrupuleuse who tended towards hysteria. 

It would be difficult to find a fairer account of the 
similarity between certain phenomena in the lives of the 
mystics and the symptoms of hysteria than that pro¬ 
vided by Baron von Hugel in the second volume of The 
Mystical Element in Religion. He takes the symptoms 
of hysteria mentioned by Professor Janet in his Etat 
Mental des Hysteriques, and shows how they can be 
paralleled in the life of St Catherine of Genoa, particu¬ 
larly during her last illness. There is first the very 
characteristic hysterical phenomenon of anaesthesia, in 
which cutaneous sensibility is lost over an area of the 
body. It is recorded that St Catherine “would press 
thorny rose-twigs in both her hands, and this without 
any pain.” 1 There is also often found amongst hys¬ 
terics an exaggerated affective reaction to contact or to 
certain colours. Of St Catherine it is recorded that: 

in February or March 1510, “for a day and a night, her 
flesh could not be touched, because of the great pain 
that such touching caused her.” At the end of August, 
“she was so sensitive, that it was impossible to touch 

1 Op . cit. ii. 10 , quoting Vita, pp. 113 b, 142 a. 


MYSTICISM 239 

her very clothes or the bedstead, or a single hair on her 
head, because in such case she would cry out as though 
she had been grievously wounded.” 1 

Similarly, in her reaction to colours we find that she 
cannot bear the continued presence in her room of her 
physician in his red robes. 2 

He instances too, as phenomena found in St Cathe¬ 
rine’s long illness which may be paralleled in Janet’s 
account of hysteria: 

the inability to stand or walk, with the conservation at 
times, of the power to crawl; the acceptance, followed 
by the rejection, of food, because of certain spasms in 
the throat or stomach, and the curious, mentally ex¬ 
plicable, exceptions to this incapacity; 3 the.sense, even 
at other times, of strangulation; heart palpitations, 
fever heats, strange haemorrhages from the stomach or 
even from the lung; red patches on the skin and emo¬ 
tional jaundice all over it; 

peculiar attacks of fixity from which she must be roused 
if she is not to suffer in consequence of them; a con¬ 
sciousness of possessing an extraordinary fineness of 
discrimination between sensibly identical objects; feel¬ 
ings of criminality and of being already dead; and an 
apparent loss of social feelings shown by her absence 
of emotion at the deaths of her brother and sister, com¬ 
bined with an extraordinary dependence on and claim- 
fulness towards her confessor, suggesting the attach¬ 
ment of the hysterical patient to her physician. 4 

1 Op. cit. ii. 10 , quoting Vita, pp. 113 b, 142 a. 

* Op. cit. ii. 12. 

3 An example of this is that in the long fasts which took place 
earlier in her life, any attempt made by St Catherine to take food 
was followed at once by vomiting; yet she was able to receive and 
to retain the host at Communion. 

4 The Mystical Element in Religion, n. pp. 24, 25. 


240 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

There seems no sufficient ground for supposing that 
mysticism is merely hysteria misunderstood by a super¬ 
stitious and wonder-loving age, but there can be little 
doubt that certain forms of mysticism and hysteria are 
on their psycho-physical side closely related. Possibly 
the extent of their connection is that both are charac¬ 
terised by a dissociation of personality, and that the 
symptoms they have in common are the symptoms of 
this dissociation. At the same time, it must be noticed 
that St Catherine of Genoa is a mystic in whom the 
relationship is particularly marked, for she was suffer¬ 
ing at the end of her life from a psychogenic disease, a 
condition which is by no means universal amongst 
mystics. If the introversion account of mysticism is on 
the right lines, it would be reasonable to expect mys¬ 
ticism on its psycho-physical side to be related to de¬ 
mentia praecox rather than with hysteria, the disorder 
attributed to regressive extroversion. We may notice, 
too, that St Catherine appears to have been extroverted 
during the whole of her mystical life, for it was spent in 
active work in a hospital at Genoa. It was seen that in 
the mysticism of St Teresa, a phase of God-centred in¬ 
troversion was followed by a phase of God-inspired 
extroversion (the Spiritual Marriage) but that the for¬ 
mer phase was the longer in time. Possibly a distinction 
ought to be made between mysticism of this type and 
mysticism in which the extroversion phase is the domi¬ 
nant one, and St Catherine of Genoa should be placed 
in the latter class. This is only a suggestion which would 
require a more extended study of the subject for its 
substantiation. 

It is customary, before leaving the subject of mys¬ 
ticism to discuss its value. Our valuation of it must 
depend entirely on our attitude towards religion as a 


MYSTICISM 


241 


whole. If we judge it from a this-world point of view, 
we must remember that for the mystic the alternative 
is probably mental ill-health; even if we do not like 
mystics, we certainly prefer them to lunatics. It is true 
that mysticism tends often to incapacitate its subject 
for activity in this world, but even on this score it may 
be justified if we look to the life of guided activity which 
is its end, and not to the stage of turning away from the 
world which is only preparatory to that end. From the 
mystic’s own point of view, however, these considera¬ 
tions are very largely irrelevant. If man’s highest 
activity is to love God, mysticism may have a value of 
its own entirely independent of any usefulness it is 
found to have in this world. 


CHAPTER XVI 


A MODERN MYSTIC 

Although one is sometimes tempted to complain that 
in certain branches of the study of the psychology of 
religion, speculation tends to replace careful observa¬ 
tion, this is not generally true of our subject. The diffi¬ 
culties in the way of continuous observation of highly 
religious persons, such as would be required for scien¬ 
tific study, have made it necessary for writers generally 
to avail themselves of such historical material as auto¬ 
biographies or the contemporary but incomplete evi¬ 
dence provided by the questionnaire. At the same time, 
more direct and more satisfactory methods of approach 
are sometimes found to be available. The most inter¬ 
esting example of such a direct study is to be found in 
an account entitled Une Mystique Moderne, by Flour¬ 
noy . 1 Since this work appeared in a Swiss psycho¬ 
logical publication, which is not generally accessible to 
English readers, I propose to give in the present chapter 
a short summary of M. Flournoy’s observations and 
conclusions, both for their very great intrinsic interest, 
and for the light they throw on the problems which have 
already been discussed. 

The subject of these observations (whom Flournoy 
calls Mile Ve) was a Swiss lady aged just over fifty 
years, directress of a Protestant school for young girls. 
She developed ecstatic religious experiences while she 
was under the observation of Flournoy, and wrote ac- 

1 Archives de Psychologie, 1915. 


A MODERN MYSTIC 243 

counts of them which show great psychological insight. 
Later, she lost the ecstatic form of religious experience, 
at about the time of the outbreak of the European War. 
It would be of great interest to know the details of her 
spiritual history subsequent to 1915, but the regretted 
death of M. Flournoy last year seems to make that 
impossible. 

In order to understand the mental history of Mile Ve 
it is necessary to give a brief account of her life, men¬ 
tioning circumstances in it which convention would 
require us to omit. Such omission, however, would 
involve a radical falsification of the account of the 
forces which combined to produce her character as it 
is to be found at the onset of her mystical life. 

She was born in 1863. Her father was a schoolmaster, 
who was deeply religious and of high moral character. 
She had a great attachment for him, and this attach¬ 
ment had a profound influence on her later life. Her 
mother was neurotic and played a part comparatively 
unimportant in the development of the girl's emotional 
life. Amongst the influences of childhood must be men¬ 
tioned her initiation by a nurse into habits of self-abuse 
for the purpose of helping her to fall asleep. This later 
necessitated years of struggle and humiliation in order 
to free herself from the habit, which has always since 
appeared to her as the sin par excellence. She also 
suffered from a feeling of inferiority because she was not 
pretty like her sisters, and she often heard people say 
that she was awkward and unattractive. This drove her 
into day-dreams, in which she tasted all the advantages 
of which she was deprived in reality. She hated dolls, 
and preferred the violent games of boys. 

The pietism of her father led him to keep her in a 
state of complete ignorance of sexual matters. At the 


244 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


age of seventeen and a half, she was the victim of an 
assault by a man. This terrible experience was made 
worse for her by the fact that she could tell no one about 
it, and that she developed the conviction that she had 
been guilty of an unpardonable fault. While the whole 
of the character she owed to her moral and religious 
training revolted against the assault, it also awakened 
in her lower nature a passion which was purely animal. 
These two ways of reacting to her experience started a 
mental conflict which remained with her. For some 
years, the animal part of her nature seems to have re¬ 
mained in the ascendant, while she says: “De mon sub- 
conscient reste plus religieux que je ne le croyais, mon- 
taient tout a coup des bouffees d’une piete intense, mys¬ 
tique, et passionnee.” 1 In the forefront of her con¬ 
sciousness, however, she felt revolt against a God who 
had allowed her life to be devastated by the sin of 
another, and whose omnipotence had not intervened in 
her favour. 

Later in her life, her religious and moral nature re¬ 
gained the upper hand. Although this appears to have 
been a continuous process, she made a definite step in 
the reconquest of herself in her thirtieth year, which she 
sometimes regards as her conversion. After this time 
her previous sentiment against God was transferred to 
the human author of her trouble, whom she refused ever 
to forgive. Although, at her conversion, the victory was 
won for the moral element of her character, her mental 
conflict was not over. The sensual and impure part of 
her nature was now normally repressed, but she was in 
a condition of partial dissociation of personality. Her 
animal nature (which Mile Ve calls B ) still took pos¬ 
session of her for a few days several times in the course 

1 Op . cit. p. 21. 


A MODERN MYSTIC 245 

of a year. During this time she was the victim of 
sensual imaginings and dreams. She felt as if she were 
once more adolescent, and despised the cold principles 
of religion and morality which were sacred to her when 
she was in her normal state (A). She was able while in 
the state B to prevent herself from committing any 
actions which would cause scandal, but her change in 
face and manner attracted the attention of those who 
knew her well, although they had no knowledge of its 
real meaning. These onsets of the state B were in¬ 
tensely repugnant to her in her normal condition. This 
was not a condition of genuine double personality, since 
there was no discontinuity of consciousness or of 
memory between her two states. It may best be de¬ 
scribed as a partial dissociation of personality. 

She first came under the observation of Flournoy in 
the December of 1910, when she consulted him about 
the trouble of these intervals of dominance of her second 
personality. Except for these, she was in perfect health 
both physically and mentally. She had a tendency 
towards automatism and had been successful in her 
youth in automatic writing and other mediumistic phe¬ 
nomena, but she had given them up and was strongly 
averse to any practice which tended to weaken the con¬ 
trol of the personal consciousness. Apart from these 
there was nothing about her which suggested neurosis. 
Intelligent and cultivated, she had an energetic will and 
much practical good sense. Flournoy insists that she 
had none of the symptoms of hysteria or other mental 
weaknesses which are supposed to be associated with 
mysticism, and had the ordinary healthy-minded per¬ 
son’s contempt for les maladies d’imagination. 

He allowed her to open herself freely to him, and gave 


246 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

her advice with the intention of lessening her self- 
accusation. She became better but not cured. Later, 
he treated her by suggestion, both in a condition of light 
and deep hypnosis, and helped her to unveil her con¬ 
flicts by a small amount of psychoanalysis. After her 
treatment by deep hypnosis, she found herself lapsing 
into an attitude of dependence on Flournoy (the posi¬ 
tive transference of the psychoanalysts) and with char¬ 
acteristic independence she refused to continue this 
treatment. She still suffered from her second per¬ 
sonality, although the attacks became less frequent, 
and she found that the unbosoming of herself to Flour¬ 
noy and his sympathy and help gave her moral and 
Christian personality, confidence and strength. 

There was also at this time in her life a present con¬ 
flict whose solution may well have been connected with 
the beginning of her mystical life. She had formed a 
friendship with M. Y., an amateur artist and man of 
letters. This friendship had become dangerously emo¬ 
tional, and she found a peculiar charm in the freedom 
and intimacy of his letters to her. M. Y., however, was 
married, and the conscience of Mile Ve reproached her 
severely for this attachment, especially since in her evil 
phases he was identified with the man of the incident 
in her eighteenth year. In July of 1912, she broke off 
this intimacy completely and irrevocably at the cost of 
great mental pain. 


“Depuis que cette rupture est consommee,” she writes 
two years later, “j’ai realise combien plus facile m’est 
devenu le combat contre les instincts inferieurs de ma 
nature. . . . Privee de l’affection ou j’avais mis le meil- 
leur de mon ame, j’ai appris ce que c’est que la soif de 
l’amour eternel et seul fidele a lui-meme. Comme un 


A MODERN MYSTIC 247 

enfant blesse qui ne trouve la paix que dans les bras 
de sa mere, ce n’est que dans les bras de Dieu que j’ai 
pu etre consolee de la blessure que m’avait fait un 
homme. ...” 1 

The libido which had been freed from its earthly object 
was ready to turn itself towards God with a complete¬ 
ness which had hitherto been impossible. 

Earlier in her life there had been a time when she had 
a foretaste of the mystical experience, for in a diary of 
1896 and 1897 she describes experiences which she later 
recognised to be of the same order as her more recent 
ones. On the 13th of December, 1896, she wrote: 

Tu m’as fait, une fois de nouveau, sentir Ta presence 
d’une fagon extraordinaire; je ne sais que dire et com¬ 
ment le dire. 

On the 18th of February in the following year: 

Comment dire ce que mon ame a traverse ce matin, 
comme je venais de m’eveiller! Dieu m’a prise un 
moment tout entiere a Lui, je ne sais comment, mais 
j’ai senti sa presence. 

In May of the same year: 

J’ai si soif d’amour humain! C’est un peche que de ne 
pouvoir etre satisfaite de ce qui m’est offert d’amour 
divin. 

And a fortnight later: 

Tu m’as fait la glorieuse grace de me faire sentir ta 
presence . . . un instant seulement. 2 

Possibly she is describing here what has traditionally 
been called the prayer of quiet. If so, the passage from 
this to her later experiences seems not to have been 
continuous, for the occurrence of this earlier experience 

1 Op. cit. p. 34. 2 Ibid. p. 24. 


248 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

became almost effaced from her memory. It seems 
reasonable to surmise that it ceased while, in her in¬ 
timacy with M. Y., she was finding satisfaction in the 
amour humain for which she had thirsted. On re-read¬ 
ing this passage in her diary, during the time of her 
ecstasies, she was shocked by the conventionality of its 
thought and expression, and said that it seemed to her 
as if she had at that time been worshipping “un petit 
bon Dieu de platre avec une robe rose ou bleue.” 

It was during the autumn of 1912 that Mile Ve began 
to have the first experience which led up to her later 
ecstasies. It took the form of what the older mystics 
would have called an intellectual vision of an unseen 
friend whose presence brought her peace and courage. 
On the 12th of November, 1912, she writes: 

Je ne vois ni n’entends rien, mais je sais qu’il est la, au 
calme et au repos delicieux qui m’envahissent. Je ne 
sais s’il a un corps; il n’est en aucune fagon pergu par 
mes sens, sinon que je crois l’entendre parler, mais d’une 
voix tout interieure. ... II vient ordinairement le soir, 
avant que je m’endorme; mais pas tous les soirs. 
Quelque chose de tres fort et surtout de tres calme, vient 
de lui a moi. 1 

She talked freely to the presence and although he spoke 
little she felt that he understood her completely. Some¬ 
times he reminded her of her father, but not altogether. 
He seemed younger, and she spoke to him about things 
on which she had been reticent with her father. At the 
same time, although she cherished the experience be¬ 
cause of the happiness it brought her, she retained a 
critical attitude towards it. She seems to have looked 
upon it as a new dissociation of her personality, but as 
one which was superior to her conscious self. Once only 

1 Op. cit. pp. 41 and 42. 


A MODERN MYSTIC 249 

she speculated as to the possibility that it was a personal 
revelation of Christ, but generally her intellectual atti¬ 
tude towards it was analytic and critical, although she 
was content emotionally to accept the peace and 
strength which it brought her. 

Flournoy considers that the psychological elements 
from which this phantom was built up were four. First, 
the idealised memory of her father; secondly, the sug¬ 
gestions of serenity, courage, self-mastery, etc., which 
she had received from Flournoy himself; thirdly, those 
examples of humanity at its best which had most struck 
her in the course of her reading, such as Duperrut, 
Frommel, etc.; and lastly, all her Christian instruction 
and faith. The figure never became more than a feeling 
of a presence, and it was sometimes absent for long 
periods, always during the now less frequent phases of 
her evil personality. It was ordinarily located on the 
left. Its appearance was always accompanied by a 
feeling of well-being, and also occasionally by numbness 
of the extremities. It is interesting to notice that she 
was unable to call up the presence by voluntary effort; 
on the contrary, an attempt to make it more tangible 
tended to result in its disappearance. 

This intermittent presence of her spiritual friend 
lasted for about six months, at the end of which the ex¬ 
perience suddenly changed its nature so completely that 
she felt it to be something entirely new in its nature and 
genuinely divine. It was on the 2nd of March, 1913, 
that the feeling of presence passed into the experience 
of ecstasy. This followed a series of undisturbed and 
dreamless nights. On this night she lay down and, 
realising that she was not going to sleep, she made up 
her mind to try as hard as she could to call up her 
“meilleur autre.” She concentrated her thought and 


250 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


will on this object, remaining with eyes closed, and try¬ 
ing with all her power to avoid distraction. She was on 
the point of giving up the effort as useless, when she 
felt a sudden loss of power and will to move her limbs, 
and a sensation of cold combined with a pleasant numb¬ 
ness. Then she felt the presence cross her room from 
the door to the bed. She thus describes the experience 
which followed: 

J’avais hier l’impression que mon etre spirituel etait 
libre des liens qui l’enchainent a la matiere et qu’il 
emergeait dans une autre economie. Je n’ai pas eu la 
perception d’un dialogue meme d’un monologue vrai- 
ment parle, mais d’une sorte de liberation, parce qu’i7 
etait venu et que je n’avais plus conscience de mon moi 
limite et enserre par la matiere. Sans effort j’etais 
comme consciente d’une autre realite essentielle et im- 
muable. Le mot de St-Paul me vient a la pensee: “Je 
fus ravi en esprit, si c’est dans mon corps ou hors de 
mon corps je ne sais, Dieu le sait.” 

Je n’ai rien vu, rien entendu, je n’etais ni endormie, 
ni evanouie, et pourtant j’etais ailleurs et j’etais autre. 1 

-Lorsque je repris conscience de mon moi habituel, 

je me sentis tres faible, comme bouleversee par une tres 
forte emotion, mais ay ant beaucoup de peine a realiser 
et a formuler ce qui s’etait passe. Je ne le saisis que par 
l’impression laissee, une sorte de certitude absolue 

DE LA REALITE DU DIVIN. 

II me semble aujourd’hui que la vie est facile a 
supporter vaillamment, parce que j’ai realise comme 
jamais encore qu’elle n’est pas tout, qu’elle n’est qu’une 
partie de la realite derniere. 2 

She was unable to say how long the experience lasted, 
whether for a minute or for an hour. She insists (as do 

J The three hyphens which follow represent a period of loss of 
consciousness in ecstasy. 

3 Op. cit. pp. 61 and 62. 


A MODERN MYSTIC 251 

many of the mystics) on the indescribability of her ex¬ 
perience—“Les mots ne sont pas faits pour decrire ce 
que j’ai eprouve, ou subi, ou experience.” 1 She states 
that she was neither conscious of her body nor of her 
own identity; above all, the impression of time was lost, 
she seemed to be plunged in timelessness, in eternity. 
Combined with this she felt the essential reality of a 
presence which she was disposed to call that of the Life 
of God. While hearing and seeing nothing, she felt this 
presence about her and in her. “C’etait a la fois une 
immensite et une intimite.” 2 Although quickly giving 
the name of God to this enveloping presence, she did 
not feel as if she were going through any ordinary relig¬ 
ious experience. It was both more overpowering and 
less precise than what she had previously regarded as 
her religious experiences. 

This ecstatic experience recurred at irregular inter¬ 
vals until the end of the July of the following year, the 
total number of its recurrences being thirty-one. At 
Flournoy’s request, she made complete notes of these ex¬ 
periences at the time of their occurrence. Before the end 
of the period over which the ecstasies were distributed, 
Flournoy sent her back her earliest records, and in her 
comments on these we can read most easily the record of 
her spiritual development during this time. First she 
notices that her experience has so modified the tradi¬ 
tional element in her religious belief that her former 
faith seems to her to have been limited and formal. 

Elle a inaugure en moi une nouvelle conception du di- 
vin, a laquelle je ne suis pas arrivee d’un bond, mais qui 
me semble maintenant avoir consiste a degager l’idee de 
Dieu de toute entrave dogmatique, de toute formule 

1 Op. cit. p. 63. 

2 Ibid. 



252 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


immuable. Avant cela, j’avais de Dieu une idee tou- 
jours la meme (cut and dried, comme disent les 
Anglais); et je sens bien, maintenant, combien limitee, 
etriquee, etait cette conception. 1 

She feels her,self so completely unable to describe her 
experience that she does not attempt it. She can only 
characterise it as a new emotion accompanied by the 
triumphant and unreasoning conviction that it is con¬ 
tact with that which is. It appears to her as immediate 
contact with what she feels as a divine force. 

But she also has a reaction against this experience. 
She is puzzled and even indignant to find herself the 
sole depositary of a mystery; to find how powerless her 
experience leaves her to communicate any of its refresh¬ 
ment to the discouraged and thirsting souls with whom 
she comes into daily contact. This feeling is the feature 
of her mysticism which most sharply separates her from 
the traditional attitude towards such experiences. She 
trembles when she finds this thought apparently lead¬ 
ing her in the direction of the denial of God’s revelation 
to her soul. 

Mais comment serais-je eternellement satisfaite de ce 
qui n’est pas transmissible? Ce serait redescendre, loin 
de la route ou Christ a marche; ce serait revenir a un 
Dieu qui favorise quelques elus—et de ces elus je ne 
veux pas etre! 2 

She cannot really doubt that her experience is from 
above, for it has caused her to make an advance she 
would not otherwise have made, but she feels that it is 
necessary for her to go further, from the experience to 
God who gives and communicates Himself. She recog¬ 
nises the value of the joy and certainty which her experi- 

cit. p. 47. *Ibid. p. 148. 


A MODERN MYSTIC 253 

ences have brought her, and of the substitution of 
immediate knowledge of the divine for a merely formal 
and traditional knowledge. “Mais maintenant,” she 
writes in the May of 1914, “oh! que j’ai soif de realiser 
Vamour divin, comme j’ai realise la realite divine!” 1 
This perplexity did not disappear as time went on, 
and the ecstasies became less frequent. On one night 
in July her thoughts converged towards the idea of a 
sacrifice of herself; for a moment the conviction formed 
itself that she would only re-find God by dying to her¬ 
self. This was an idea which she found repellent, and 
she rebelled against the idea of making this sacrifice for 
which God was waiting before He would again reveal 
Himself as before. She was doubtful whether she was 
not being misled by her intense desire for her former 
experience to arrive at an idea of meritorious sacrifice. 
She still suffered occasionally from evil dreams at the 
time of her periods, but these appear only to have been 
faint shadows of the old attacks of her evil personality. 
On the 31st of July, 1914, she experienced her last 
ecstasy; the events which followed that date (felt 
keenly by an inhabitant of a neutral country with 
friends and relatives in both camps) confirmed her in 
the tendency of her mystical experience to believe that 
God is not in this world. More than ever, she felt led 
to seek for God, not in mystical experience, but in an 
energetic effort of will. 

What in the end her religious experiences meant for 
her, and what was their value for her life, can best be 
told in her own words: 

J'ai Timpression ce soir que pour moi la page se toume 
de nouveau. Le temps de la vie surtout personnelle est 
passe. . . . J’ai l’impression d’achever maintenant un 

1 Op. cit. p. 148. 


254 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


cycle de ma vie religieuse. Sous la poussee puissante 
de l’Experience mon ame a fait un grand pas vers plus 
de spiritualite. Dieu a cesse pour moi d’etre limite et 
circonscrit dans l’histoire de sa revelation. Comme le 
soleil, II est eleve sur l’horizon de mon ame, jusqu’a 
remplir tout, par dela ce qui n’est qu’humain, le bien et 
le mal, le temps et l’espace. ... II faut aller plus loin. 
Apres avoir retrouve sur la montagne, d’abord la 
lumiere, puis le Dieu qui est la Lumiere et la Vie et 
1’Amour, il faut maintenant redescendre dans la plaine 
ou Fon souffre, et apprendre, comme je ne l’ai encore 
jamais fait peut-etre, a donner ma vie. . . . Je n’ai pas 
l’impression que la vie mystique soit dans une periode 
ascendante en moi: rappel a l’activite pratique, a la 
presence d’esprit et au bon sens, est trop urgent. Je 
suis plongee dans des discussions d’economie domes- 
tique (et d’economie tout court), dans des questions de 
salaire et de nourriture. . . J 

One is tempted to ask what, in traditional mysticism, 
would correspond to Mile Ve’s change from her ecstatic 
phase to this phase of religiously directed activity. Even 
the language in which she describes it recalls forcibly 
the mystic phase known as the Spiritual Marriage. 
Flournoy scouts this idea and prefers to describe it as 
a reaction from an introverted to an extroverted state. 
This, however, is exactly what, in psychological terms, 
the Spiritual Marriage is. It is the change from an intro¬ 
verted condition dominated by the consciousness of the 
presence of God, to an extroverted condition similarly 
dominated. On the other hand, it might be argued from 
the point of view of traditional mysticism that Mile Ve 
lost the highest gifts of mysticism through her failure 
to respond to the demand for a complete dying to her¬ 
self. Finally, of course, an opponent of mysticism might 

1 Op. cit. pp. 159, 160. 


255 


A MODERN MYSTIC 

argue that she emerged from the mystical condition 
through the strength of her own moral nature which led 
her to see the moral worthlessness of a mere emotional 
experience, particularly when the outbreak of war led 
her to feel more urgently the call to action. This would 
indeed make it necessary to ignore her own repeated 
affirmations of the permanent value of her mystical ex¬ 
perience to her later active life. This, however, is a 
question which we could not even hope to be able to 
decide without the additional data provided by a knowl¬ 
edge of her later mental and religious development. 

A point of importance illustrated by Mile Ve’s mys¬ 
ticism is the connection between the mystical experi¬ 
ences and the sex-instinct. We may remind ourselves 
of the facts of Mile Ve’s sexual history. The evil phases 
which resulted from a partial dissociation of personality 
consequent on her early assault, were accompanied by 
outbreaks of autoeroticism and sexual dreams. These 
were liable to occur at her menses even during the time 
of her ecstasies. Her mother played a negligible part in 
her life, but her affection for her father produced what 
Dr Jung calls an Electra-Complex. The fixation on one 
of the parents is commonly found to be accompanied 
by a tendency to homosexuality, which is also to be 
found in Mile Ve. She states that until her intimacy 
with M. Y., although she had friendships with men, 
passion and jealousy were only present in her relation¬ 
ships with women. 

It was pointed out that this relationship to her father 
seems to have been one psychological ingredient in her 
earlier experience of the Spiritual Friend. The other 
element of importance in her emotional life was this 
strongly repressed sexuality which found its outlet in 
her state ( B ). That this was playing a part in her 


256 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

mystical experience was a conclusion which Mile Ve was 
very unwilling to admit. The severity of her repression 
of sexual things itself tended to increase this unwilling¬ 
ness. Sex and religion had always appeared to her to 
be poles apart. Yet she was puzzled and distressed to 
find that the immediate moral and spiritual effect of the 
experience itself was followed by an excitement which 
she recognised as sexual, sometimes violent and some¬ 
times immediately repressed. She attributed it at first 
to a momentary relaxation of her moral self-discipline. 
But even when she first remarks on it (May 18th, 1913) 
she also suggests that there may be a real affinity be¬ 
tween human and divine love, and she notices the fact 
that they have, to a large extent, the same language. 
She also remarks (July 14th, 1914) that two of her 
friends who were temperamentally unable to feel sex 
love seemed also incapable of experiencing Vemotion du 
divin. It is hardly necessary to add that the belief in the 
affinity between human and religious love to which she 
was led was not that of Mr Schroeder. She remained 
convinced of the difference in value between the dif¬ 
ferent directions of the libido. 

There seems to be no satisfactory evidence connect¬ 
ing the times of her experiences with the rhythm of her 
sex-life. Flournoy points out that the intervals between 
the first sixteen of her ecstasies were as follows: 5, 3, 11, 
7, 8, 5, 8, 6, 7, 11, 5, 8, 9, 8, 7 days. The mean of these is 
7. Flournoy concludes that the .ecstasies had a period 
which was just a quarter of her menstrual period, but 
that this periodicity was masked by the great variations 
due to the mental condition of the moment. It seems 
perilous, however, to try to draw any conclusions from 
the mean of numbers which vary so widely amongst 
themselves. One is also tempted to wonder whether the 


A MODERN MYSTIC 257 

two years of ecstasy occurred during the period of cli¬ 
macteric excitement, and whether the cessation of 
ecstasy was not coincident with the end of that period. 
Flournoy does not mention this point, but it seems clear 
from the narrative that the climacteric had not occurred 
at the time that Flournoy's account of her ends (March, 
1915). 

We may sum up the characters of the mystical ex¬ 
perience of Mile Ve by mentioning the headings under 
which Flournoy discusses it. He notices its ontological 
certainty, its ineffability, its imperative character, its 
incommunicability, its non-personality, the resultant 
depreciation of traditional religion and lastly its sexual 
coefficient. In all of these respects it does not differ 
from the traditional Christian mystical experience. It 
will hardly be denied that both the fifth and sixth ele¬ 
ments are present as tendencies even in Catholic mys¬ 
ticism, but these tendencies are resisted as dangers of 
an exclusive reliance on subjective experience in re¬ 
ligion. The religion of the Catholic mystic is never the 
religion supplied by his mystical experience alone. He 
has a greater respect for traditional ways of thought and 
expression than had Mile Ve, a respect which saves him 
from the danger of spiritual isolation which Mile Ve 
did not altogether manage to avoid. 

A marked difference from traditional mysticism is to 
be found in the absence of any preliminary ascetic prac¬ 
tices, but it is easy to exaggerate the completeness of 
this absence. Although undertaken simply for moral 
discipline and not for the sake of attaining to spiritual 
experiences, the practices of her life were often severe. 
Even at the age of twenty-four, she forced herself for 
three months to get up between four and five in the 


258 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

mornings in order to overcome her habitual reluctance 
to rise. She remained an early riser, and her habits of 
life were frugal. Most important of all, she strongly 
repressed the sexual side of her nature. This repression 
was symbolised in those of her dreams which dealt with 
these matters by the slaying of a white horse. It culmi¬ 
nated in the definite sacrifice of her love-life when she 
renounced her intimacy with M. Y. It was suggested 
in an earlier chapter, when discussing the mystical con¬ 
version, that this was the essential step in freeing the 
libido from its earthly attachments, compared with 
which the other ascetic practices were relatively un¬ 
important. 

In discussing the psychological determinants of Mile 
Ve’s mysticism, it is also necessary to remember that a 
habit of introversion was probably implanted in child¬ 
hood by the feeling of inferiority which has already been 
mentioned. This is the kind of factor in mental de¬ 
velopment upon which stress is laid by the psycho¬ 
analytic school of Dr Adler, which also is recognised as 
an important determinant of introversion by Dr Jung. 
The tendency to seek for happiness in another system 
of reality, may already have been implanted in her by 
her childhood’s failure to find it in this world. 

The last point of importance to which I wish to draw 
attention is the value of Mile Ve’s mysticism for her 
mental health and for her life. It is essentially mis¬ 
leading to talk of mysticism (as so many psychologists 
do) as if it were a succession of emotional experiences 
which were valued merely as emotional experiences. 
Flournoy quotes Silberer’s statement that true mys¬ 
ticism is characterised by an enlargement of personality, 
and he finds striking evidence of such enlargement in 
Mile Ve. The manner of dealing with her libido by its 


A MODERN MYSTIC 


259 


sublimation into religious channels is one which re¬ 
sulted in an enrichment, and not in an impoverishment 
of her character. Even if we rejected its claim to ob¬ 
jective reality, we could not judge the value of her mys¬ 
ticism without taking into account the fact that it prob¬ 
ably played an essential part in bringing stability and 
happiness into a life which seemed to have been blasted 
in its beginnings by the wickedness of another person. 


CHAPTER XVII 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 

We have so far been describing the phenomena of the 
religious consciousness, and discussing its psychological 
mechanism without concerning ourselves with the ques¬ 
tion of how far what has been said has any bearing on 
our intellectual attitude towards religion. It is clear 
that at many points we have been skirting questions 
of great practical importance, which probably raised 
themselves in the minds of my readers at such points. 
It is to such questions (belonging rather to the philoso¬ 
phy than to the psychology of religion) that I intend to 
devote this last chapter. 

We must begin by making clear exactly how much we 
intend to discuss, and what kind of answers we may 
expect to our questions. The central problem is, What 
contribution does such a psychological treatment of re¬ 
ligion make to our knowledge of its truth or falsity? 
We may ask whether we have shown that all the phe¬ 
nomena of religion are explicable in terms of known 
mental activities, and therefore proved its untruth. Or 
have we shown the inability of psychology to give a 
satisfactory account of some of the facts of the religious 
consciousness, and therefore left room for the action of 
God? It is in some such form as the foregoing questions 
that the problem is often posed, but the form of the two 
questions is open to objection since it involves assump¬ 
tions which must themselves be examined. We may 

260 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 261 

take both of these questions one stage further back and 
ask whether success in the expression of the phenomena 
of religion in terms of known mental processes would 
indeed prove its falsity, and whether it is really in the 
gaps in our scientific knowledge that we must look for 
the finger of God. The answer to these last two ques¬ 
tions is very generally assumed in the hasty solutions of 
the problems of religious psychology which are often 
given. 

Professor Leuba, for example, assumes a positive 
answer to the first of them when he says: 

If there were extra-human sources of knowledge and 
superhuman sources of human power, their existence 
should, it seems, have become increasingly evident. Yet 
the converse is apparently true; the supernatural world 
of the savage has become a natural world to civilized 
man; the miraculous of yesterday is the explicable of 
to-day. In religious lives accessible to psychological in¬ 
vestigation, nothing requiring the admission of super¬ 
human influences has been found. There is nothing, for 
example, in the life of the great Spanish mystic whose 
celebrity is being renewed by contemporary psychol¬ 
ogists,—not a desire, not a feeling, not a thought, not 
a vision, not an illumination,—that can seriously make 
us look to transcendent causes . 1 

He goes on, not to prove, but to assume that he has 
thus disposed of what he calls transcendent causes. 
There are, of course, other criticisms of this passage 
from Leuba. For example, it is impossible to pretend 
that our knowledge of psychological laws is so complete 
that we can honestly say that it provides us with an ex¬ 
planation of the desires, thoughts, feelings, etc., of any¬ 
body. The point, however, which I wish to emphasise at 
present is that it makes the unproved assumption that 
1 A Psychological Study of Religion, p. 272. 


262 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


religion would be convicted of falsity if it could be ex¬ 
pressed in terms of known psychological laws. 

The positive answer to the second of these two ques¬ 
tions (which is, of course, implied by a positive answer 
to the first) seems to be assumed by Professor J. Bissett 
Pratt when he is arguing against Leuba’s view and says: 

if the psychologist can explain all the facts of the 
religious consciousness by scientific laws then there is 
no psychological proof of God’s presence and influence 
in our lives . 1 

He does not take Leuba’s further step of supposing 
that our failure to find evidence of breaks in the causal 
sequence of mental events in the religious life is evi¬ 
dence that religion is false, but only that no evidence 
can be brought for its truth from the psychological 
study of religion. The possibility that the religious ex¬ 
planation of religious experience may be the true one, 
although psychological investigation is powerless to 
prove it, he illustrates in the following manner. He sup¬ 
poses that the human race is living in perpetual sun¬ 
light, but that most men are blind and a few only are 
able to see. One of those men who can see will, on open¬ 
ing his eyes, be receiving light sensations. One of the 
blind psychologists could apply the method of single 
difference to demonstrate that the opening of the eyes 
was the cause of the light sensations and fully explained 
them (in the psychological sense), no reference being 
needed to the sun or the ether waves or any other outer 
source. If the seer insisted that he saw the sun, the 
psychologist could challenge him to see light with his 
eyes shut, or to fail to see it w T ith them open, or to point 
out a single element in his experience not accounted for 

1 The Religion.s Consciousness, p. 455. 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 263 

by the psychological formula. Both, Pratt considers, 
would be right. Within its own limits the psychological 
explanation would be complete, and it would be vain to 
seek to prove the objective existence of the sun by 
breaking down the psychological correlation of light 
sensation and organic condition. And yet it would be 
true that the seer saw the sun. 

We will now return to the discussion of the idea that 
it is sufficient in order to refute religion to state that all 
its phenomena can be accounted for by the operation 
of the ordinary laws of psychology. Of course, with the 
present limitation of our knowledge of the laws of 
mental operations, it is not true that they can; but per¬ 
haps this will be possible one day. The position that, in 
this case, religion would be proved to be illusory, is not 
ordinarily stated. The opponent of religion is content 
to demonstrate, so far as he can, that religion is expli¬ 
cable in terms of ordinary psychological processes, and 
to give a metaphorical shrug of his shoulders which in¬ 
duces his readers to take the further step for themselves. 

The foregoing discussion should have made it clear 
that this position is reached by two steps. The first is 
the statement that the only possible psychological 
proof of the reality of divine action in religious experi¬ 
ence is the discovery of gaps in its psychological causa¬ 
tion, that no such gaps can be found, and that, there¬ 
fore, the truth of religion cannot be proved by psy¬ 
chology. The second step is that if it cannot be proved 
by psychology then it is not true; a fallacy well rebutted 
by Pratt in his parable of the blind psychologist and the 
seer of the sun. But surely it is enough to state it ex¬ 
plicitly to make it clear that this second step is a fallacy 
which can only escape detection when it conceals itself 
as an implicit assumption. 


264 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

But even the first step, which Professor Pratt ad¬ 
mits, cannot be allowed to pass unquestioned. Is it 
absolutely certain that the only evidence we could pos¬ 
sibly have of the divine origin of religious states of mind 
is that they are not found to obey the same psycho¬ 
logical laws as other mental facts? It does not seem to 
be self-evident that this is the case. I intend later to 
mention ways in which religious people have attempted 
to justify their faith by arguments drawn from religious 
experience which do not involve any assertion of a con¬ 
tradiction of known psychological laws. We may, of 
course, on examining them decide that all of these argu¬ 
ments are invalid. If we do, and if no others can be 
found, it will be necessary for religious persons to fall 
back on arguments drawn from mental facts which fall 
outside known psychological laws (if such can be found) 
if they intend to use psychology as a support for their 
faith. But we must protest against the introduction at 
this stage of an assumption (and a totally unnecessary 
assumption) which would condemn all such arguments 
unheard. 

A similar criticism must be directed against another 
too easy method of refuting religion adopted by Feuer¬ 
bach and by some of the psychoanalytical writers. This 
is a reduction of the doctrines of religion to fulfilments 
of human wishes with the implicit conclusion that they 
are therefore illusory. We ought, indeed, to be careful 
in the use of the argument so common in popular the¬ 
ology which uses the fact that particular doctrines of 
Christianity fulfil mental needs as evidence for their 
truth. Unless we assume the existence of a benevolent 
God, there seems no sufficient reason for saying that the 
actual nature of the universe must correspond with our 
desires, but certainly it may. If we had other grounds 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 265 

for believing in the existence of a benevolent God, there 
might even be a presumption in favour of the nature of 
reality being such as our demands required it to be. The 
reduction of religious dogma to wish-fulfilment—the 
belief in God to the demand for a perfect lover or for the 
parent, the belief in immortality to the demand for con¬ 
tinued personal existence and for the survival of those 
we love, and so on—cannot in itself be a valid logical 
argument against religion, for it would only be effective 
as evidence against religious truth if the hypothesis of 
the reality of God were ruled out on other grounds. 

There is a last tendency which must also be noticed 
to abandon, on logically insufficient grounds, the claim 
to truth of religion. It was stated in earlier chapters 
that heterosuggestion and autosuggestion played a part 
in the formation of religious belief. It is easy to make 
the inference that religion is merely the result of sug¬ 
gestion, and to dismiss it as a delusion partly fostered 
by other people and partly by ourselves. This inference 
becomes easier if we always think of autosuggestion as 
a method of self-deception, and of autohypnosis as a 
condition involving the lulling to sleep of the “higher 
faculties/’ so that self-deception may be successfully 
carried out. But we saw that this was a ridiculously 
misleading way of looking at these things. Autosugges¬ 
tion is a process of the education of the subconscious, 
and autohypnosis and its related mental states (Bau- 
douin’s contention, concentration, etc.) are conditions 
under which this education is most effectively carried 
out. Autosuggestion may be employed to implant true 
ideas in the mind as well as false. The above considera¬ 
tions apply, of course, equally to the implanting of 
beliefs by heterosuggestion. The fact that religious 
beliefs are fostered by the methods of suggestion is no 


266 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

evidence either of their falsity or of their truth. The 
only real relevance of this fact to the problem of the 
truth of religious belief is that it makes impossible any 
proof of the truth of a religious doctrine from its mere 
existence as a belief. It still remains possible to argue 
that the belief has characters which give evidence that 
it is true. 

The question as to whether religious experience can 
give any evidence for the truth of religion is an impor¬ 
tant one at the present time. Many schools of religious 
thought are now trying to base the whole of their the¬ 
ology on subjective experience. Others, more cautiously, 
recognise this as one amongst many sources of religious 
knowledge. As an example of the latter attitude, I will 
quote a passage from Professor Sorley’s Gifford lectures: 

When reflexion intervenes upon this [religious] ex¬ 
perience, the dangerous process of describing and 
naming begins. The power to which the individual 
trusts for reconciliation and security—in a word, for 
salvation—is conceived as beyond the reach of hostile 
or indifferent forces, as willing the good which the wor¬ 
shipper conceives, and as able to carry out what he 
wills. Starting in this way from the facts of religious 
experience, the religious man becomes involved in the 
same problems, concerning the relation of nature and 
values to one another and of both to the ultimate 
ground of reality, which meet the philosopher in his 
attempt to arrive at an interpretation of the universe. 1 

This tendency has passed from the work of original 
thinkers into popular writings on theology, and in these 
it sometimes takes forms which are open to serious 
criticism. The objective validity of religious experience 
easily becomes a formula which serves no other purpose 

1 Moral Values and the Idea of God, p. 478. 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 267 

than to hide looseness of thought. All religious experi¬ 
ence cannot be valid (unless, of course, we choose to 
mean by religious experience only such subjective ex¬ 
perience as is objectively valid, when the formula loses 
all possibility of proving of practical value). If the 
formula is to mean anything at all for us, we must, 
before employing it, seriously face two questions. The 
first is whether we can know that any religious experi¬ 
ence is objectively valid, i.e. points to a reality beyond 
itself. If we decide that it can, we find ourselves faced 
with the problem of finding a criterion by which we can 
decide what part of the subjective experience connected 
with religion has this objective validity and what part 
has not. 

I will begin by discussing a particularly simple answer 
to the second of these questions, since it is clear that if 
we could begin by discovering a criterion by which the 
objective validity of some religious experience was 
clearly established, we would also have answered our 
first question without having given ourselves much 
trouble. If we fail to find such a clearly marked cri¬ 
terion, it may still be possible that we can justify the 
formula the objective validity of religious experience, 
but it will be necessary to do so by first finding out 
whether any religious experience can be reasonably held 
to point to a reality behind it, and then working out a 
rough practical guide which may tell us no more than 
that on the whole it is probable that certain experiences 
have this reference to a reality behind them, while 
others probably have not. 

Such intense experiences as mystical states of prayer, 
and, to a less extent, other religious experiences, seem 
often to come with a character of givenness which 
makes it impossible for the experient to doubt that they 


268 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

come from outside himself. The mystic experiences 
voices and visions which he feels certain cannot come 
from his own mind, because they come as suddenly into 
his consciousness and as independently of the stream of 
his thought as do perceptions. In an earlier chapter I 
quoted from a thesis by a French Protestant, who says: 
“we feel within us a being that is not ourselves; we see 
born within us new ideas and perceptions, real revela¬ 
tions that do not come from ourselves.” 1 Now, it is just 
this character of coming from outside our own minds, 
which we may call givenness, that is, the subjective 
mark of what we consider to belong to the outside 
world; it is the mark of objects of perception as distinct 
from those of imagination. It follows that the affirma¬ 
tion that all experiences accompanied by this mark are 
experiences of objective reality is a natural one. If psy¬ 
chology could give no other explanation of this char¬ 
acter than that such experience is of the nature of per¬ 
ception, then the argument as to the reality of the 
objects of religion would, at least, be settled for those 
who have had such experiences. Other people, too, 
might reasonably be asked to accept the testimony of 
the large number of persons to whom the experience was 
real. Unfortunately, however, psychological science has 
another explanation of this character which prevents us 
from taking such an easy path out of our difficulties. 

This character of givenness belongs not only to per¬ 
ceptions of external reality, but also to any experiences 
which result from the passage of mental processes from 
unconscious regions of the mind to consciousness. 
Dreams, and the vague images and intuitions which 
cross our minds in the waking state, equally with relig¬ 
ious feelings, seem to be outside the stream of thought, 

1 A Psychological Study of Religion. Leuba, p. 222. 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 269 

and like religious feelings have been rationalised by at¬ 
tributing their origin to something outside the person 
experiencing them. In certain forms of mental disorder 
these images and thoughts possess the same convinc¬ 
ingly apparent objective reality as the visions and locu¬ 
tions of the mystic. The conflicts which emerge from 
the subconscious of these insane persons are heard by 
them as voices which are as objectively real to them as 
the voices of actual people belonging to the real world. 
We can find, however, a full and sufficient explanation 
of such experiences in the theory that they are irrup¬ 
tions into consciousness of material from unconscious 
levels of the mind. The apparently outside origin of re¬ 
ligious experiences may reasonably be explained in the 
same way. It is possible, therefore, to say with Dela¬ 
croix, that where the mystic postulates God, the psy¬ 
chologist need only postulate the subconscious. In 
arguing against the psychologist in this matter, it is 
grossly unfair to talk (as do Fr. Poulain and many other 
Roman Catholic writers) of the subconscious as if it 
were a hypothesis invented by the psychologists for the 
sole purpose of providing an alternative explanation of 
religious phenomena. The subconscious is becoming 
increasingly well known in general psychology, and in 
general psychology its action is found in phenomena 
closely parallel to those of the religious life. 

We must be careful, however, to notice exactly how 
far these considerations have carried us. They have 
given us no reason for supposing that no valid argument 
can be drawn for the validity of religious experience 
from psychological data. They have only shown the 
weakness of this one simple and rather crude argument 
from the givenness of such experience—the argument 
that because I feel that these experiences have not come 



270 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

from my own mind, they are due to divine action. Un¬ 
doubtedly this argument has sometimes been used ex¬ 
plicitly to prove the validity of religious experience, and 
probably it has much more force to the minds of unre¬ 
flecting people who do not argue about their experience 
at all. But it is very easy to exaggerate the extent to 
which it has been used. As soon as religious persons 
begin to reflect on their subjective experiences they find 
that a large number of them cannot be due to divine 
action because they seem to be evil in their fruits, and 
these seem to have just the same character of percep¬ 
tions as the others. Angels are seen, but the fruit of the 
visions is pride, and voices purporting to be divine ex¬ 
hort the saint to rebellion or to peculiarity of doctrine 
or practice. He, of course, still believes that they come 
from some source outside himself, and attributes them 
to the devil. The important thing to notice is that he 
finds himself unable to make the simple criterion of 
givenness a sufficient criterion of the divine source of 
his revelations. 

Let us turn to St Teresa as a typical reflective mystic 
to see what she did, in fact, take as a criterion of the 
divine source of her experiences. It is much more com¬ 
plex than the one we have just been discussing. When 
giving her reasons for believing that a form of ecstasy, 
which she calls the flight of the spirit, is neither an 
illusion nor the work of the devil, she says: 

neither the imagination nor the evil one could represent 
what leaves such peace, calm, and good fruits in the 
soul, and particularly the following three graces of a 
very high order. The first of these is a perception of the 
greatness of God, which becomes clearer to us as we 
witness more of it. Secondly, we gain self-knowledge 
and humility as we see how creatures so base as our- 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 271 

selves in comparison with the Creator of such wonders, 
have dared to offend Him in the past or venture to gaze 
on Him now. The third grace is a contempt of all 
earthly things unless they are consecrated to the ser¬ 
vice of so great a God. 1 

I do not propose, at present, to discuss the validity 
of St Teresa’s criteria, but only to point out how far 
removed they are from the simple argument from the 
apparent extramental origin of religious experiences 
which we started by discussing. It should be clear that 
the large number of attacks on the validity of religious 
experience, which assume that this argument in its 
crudest form is the only position which need be dealt 
with, are gaining a victory very much too cheaply. 

What has been said so far has been a necessary clear¬ 
ing of the ground before starting an attack on the main 
problem—whether psychological analysis provides us 
with any means of deciding whether there is an objec¬ 
tive reality behind some part at least of what we call re¬ 
ligious experience. This is clearly a problem belonging 
to the philosophy of religion. It is a part, and only a 
part, of the problem of our knowledge of the truth of 
religious conceptions. It will be well to define the prob¬ 
lem more clearly so that we may see what part of the 
philosophy of religion it clearly is not. There are two 
main ways of approach to religious knowledge which we 
are leaving entirely on one side. These are the meta¬ 
physical way and the approach by revelation. It may 
be possible to prove the truth of religion by pure reason 
without any appeal to experience. On the other hand, it 
is possible that religious truth has been revealed and 
that any attempt to prove it either by pure reason or 
from experience is necessarily futile. It may be, of 

1 The Interior Castle, 6. v. 12. 


272 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

course, that all three methods of approach are valid and 
that all three together may be found to support the 
truth of religious conceptions. The method of approach 
by experience—the empirical method—is only one of 
three possible methods of attempting the justification 
of religious belief, and the data of a psychological study 
of religion are only a part of the data of the empirical 
method. 

I am emphasising this point because I do not wish it 
to be supposed that if we do not find any final and irre¬ 
fragable proof of the truth of religion from religious 
experience, we have undermined the foundations of re¬ 
ligious belief. Even if we found no satisfactory support 
for religion at all in the empirical method, we should 
still only have reached the position held by many re¬ 
ligious intellectualists and by the sturdiest supporters 
of revelation as the supreme source of religious knowl¬ 
edge, for neither of these have ever supposed that any 
valid defence of religion was to be found by the empir¬ 
ical method. On the other hand, if we find that we have 
not a certain proof but a strong presumption of the 
truth of religion from evidence drawn from our study, 
this result may be, in reality, a very valuable one, al¬ 
though it would be disappointing if we supposed that 
we were discussing the sole source of evidence for relig¬ 
ious truth. We have no reason for supposing that we 
shall be able to found a satisfactory apologetic on relig¬ 
ious experience alone. Any indications with which it 
may provide us must be taken in conjunction with all 
our other sources of knowledge. 

Metaphysicians point out that no empirical argument 
can give absolute certainty. All knowledge drawn from 
experience is essentially knowledge obtained by the in- 



GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 273 

ductive method, and this can only give a high degree 
of probability. We do not know that the sun will rise 
to-morrow with the same apodictic certainty as we know 
that two plus two makes four. So long as we are using 
the empirical method in our approach to religious truth, 
it is necessary, frankly to recognise that we are working 
under the same limitation. By the empirical method we 
can reach no demonstration of the truths of religion 
which must command assent in the same way as the 
truths of mathematics. We might conceivably reach as 
high a degree of probability as we have when we assert 
that the sun will rise to-morrow, but that is not what is 
meant by apodictic certainty. In actual fact, of course, 
we shall probably find that we must be content with a 
much lower degree of probability than that. 

Our attack on the problem will be made much easier 
if we bear in mind this limitation. We are not looking 
for an absolutely certain proof of the truths of religion. 
Such certainty may be supplied by revelation or by 
metaphysics, but with these we are not concerned. 
What we are looking for are considerations which appear 
to indicate, with however small a degree of probability, 
a solution to our problem. We shall not be content with 
working out one or only a few arguments for or against 
the reality of the objects of religion. If we could find 
one single convincing and final argument for the exist¬ 
ence of God which must command the assent of the 
most obstinate atheist unless he refused to follow his 
reason, then we might be satisfied with that and go no 
further. But if we know that the limitations of our 
method are such that we have no hope of finding such 
a proof, and that we are necessarily limited to judging 
probabilities and establishing presumptions, then we 


274 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

must take into account every item of experience that 
is available. The contribution of each particular part 
of experience may not be large, but the combined effect 
of a considerable number may be to produce an accumu¬ 
lation of evidence sufficient to compel belief in an 
unprejudiced mind. 

In presenting a few of the lines of argument which 
have been followed by persons trying in this way to 
marshal evidence to create a presumption in favour of 
the truth of the religious explanation of the facts of 
religious psychology, I shall try to avoid the position of 
an advocate for this explanation. I do believe, in fact, 
that it is the true one. But nothing could more fatally 
weaken the case for this explanation than an attitude 
which refused to see the weak points in the arguments 
in its favour. Our judgment of probabilities will be 
valueless unless it is a genuine judgment, that is, one 
which does not proceed from the conviction that we 
must at all costs decide on one side. We may reasonably 
refuse to investigate these questions at all, being con¬ 
tent with a simple faith or lack of faith which takes or 
refuses all on trust, but if we do investigate them we 
must do so as impartially as we can. 

If we were convinced that the empirical method was 
the only one available for the discovery of truth, so that 
we would be left in the end with a choice between two 
sets of probabilities, we should be faced by the problem 
discussed by William James in his Will to Believe. We 
have what he calls a living, forced and momentous 
option. Living because both the alternatives of relig¬ 
ious faith and agnosticism are possible to us, forced be¬ 
cause no attitude of leaving the question open is 
possible, momentous because it may be of unlimited 
importance which choice we make. At the same time it 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 275 

is (on the above assumption) an option which cannot be 
decided on intellectual grounds. In this case, James 
pleads for the right of voluntary adoption of faith. He 
says: 

Our passional natures not only lawfully may, but 
must, decide an option between propositions, whenever 
it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be 
decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such 
circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question 
open,” is itself a passional decision—just like deciding 
yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of missing 
the truth. 

It is a caricature of this position to represent it, as 
many writers do, as equivalent to saying that we may 
believe anything, whether it be true or false, if only the 
belief is of sufficient practical value to make it worth 
preserving. James is assuming that the belief in ques¬ 
tion is a live one, which it would be only if we thought 
it likely to be true. 

This position is the last trench into which the relig¬ 
ious man can be driven by his empirical opponent, and 
unless it be possible to find a final and unquestionable 
metaphysical argument for the non-existence of God 
(surely a hopeless quest) it is impossible to drive him 
from it. Evidence might be brought forward against 
the belief in God, but the religious man could reply 
that there was still a chance (however small it might 
appear) that he was right, and on the strength of this 
chance and by the demands of his passional nature, he 
intended to regulate his life on the assumption that the 
religious hypothesis was the true one. The arguments I 
am about to describe are attempts to advance from this 
last trench and to capture some of the intervening coun- 


276 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

try. They are attempts to show that not merely is there 
a chance that the religious explanation may be the true 
one, but that there is a strong presumption in its favour; 
not merely that we may accept it but that we ought to. 
It is not possible to do more than sketch a few of the 
main lines of thought which may be developed, rather 
as indications of the directions in which evidence may 
be looked for, than with any idea that they will be 
found convincing in the attenuated form in which I am 
going to present them. 

I will first take the lines of argument developed by 
Mr Will Spens in his Belief and Practice. These are: 
first, a justification of the appeal to intuition in the de¬ 
velopment of doctrine from religious experience by the 
proved success of the same appeal to intuition in the 
development of scientific doctrine from scientific data. 
Secondly, he finds in the explanation given by theology 
of religious experience, positive features which help to 
establish the validity of that explanation. Such are, its 
coherency and the power of particular beliefs to be ex¬ 
tended over other kinds of experience than those for 
which they were originally found to be successful guides. 
On the whole, a consistent system is yielded by the vari¬ 
ous particular doctrines which have been found best to 
provide a guide to religious experience. The author con¬ 
cludes that these facts provide very strong evidence for 
the validity of theology as a system of thought. I pro¬ 
pose later to develop more fully a line of thought closely 
related to the second of these. My present purpose in 
giving this bare and inadequate outline of two argu¬ 
ments from a book which follows the empirical method, 
is merely to illustrate the fact that it is possible to argue 
from religious experience to the truth of religious 
doctrine without using the crude and obviously un- 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 277 

sound psychological argument which was discussed 
earlier. 

Another line of argument may be drawn from the 
region of mental therapy. Modern psycho-pathology 
inclines towards the view that the neuroses have their 
origin in the failure of the libido of the neurotic to find 
its normal outlet in the real world. It then finds satis¬ 
faction by the creation of the neurotic symptoms, which 
are substitutes for the normal employment of the libido. 
In emotional religion, the libido may be redirected in 
default of its normal earthly outlet to the religious 
object of love—God. 

It has been said that religion is only a form of neu¬ 
rosis which, for some reason, is not regarded as patho¬ 
logical. There is, however, a good reason why the 
religious redirection of the libido is not considered to be 
pathological, for, unlike the neurotic symptom, it pro¬ 
vides a permanent and satisfactory solution of the erotic 
conflict. A practising psychoanalyst, completely scep¬ 
tical in matters of religion, once told the present writer 
that in nearly all his cases he found some religious belief 
which he did not touch because experience had taught 
him that it was the strongest force for the patient’s re¬ 
covery. One school of psychoanalysts—the Zurich 
school, followers of Dr Jung—make the inculcation of 
the religious motive a part of their therapeutic method. 

This would seem to suggest very strongly that the re¬ 
ligious solution of the erotic conflict is different in kind 
from the neurotic solution, and that when the soul which 
has found no earthly satisfaction for its love directs that 
love to God, it is doing something very different from 
the creation of a phantasy love-object in place of a real 
one. It has found a satisfactory resting-place for its love 



278 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

instead of finding an unsatisfactory solution of the con¬ 
flict between desire and reality in the neurotic symptom 
or in the phantasy. Now, many of the theories about 
religion which have been suggested by psychology of 
this type do, in fact, suppose that the objects of religion 
are merely phantasies woven by man to satisfy his emo¬ 
tional needs. But that there is this difference between 
the effectiveness of these two ways of dealing with his 
desire, seems to suggest that such different effects do 
not proceed from the same cause. I have pointed out 
in an earlier chapter that the acceptance of religion 
does, as a matter of fact, depend very largely on its 
power to satisfy man’s emotional needs, and that emo¬ 
tional religion owes much of its character to its intimate 
connection with human love. It seems reasonable to 
suppose that the genuine satisfactoriness of the relig¬ 
ious solution of the erotic conflict is the result of the 
fact that its object is a real one—that God is not merely 
a phantasy creation of the worshipping mind. 

There is a third method of approaching the problem 
which is important. We may consider that its power to 
rationalise (that is, to give a coherent, intelligible and 
reasonably simple account of ) experience is a criterion 
(however imperfect) of the truth of a religious doctrine. 
It is necessary here to make a distinction between this 
position and that of the later pragmatists, who would 
consider that the truth of a doctrine is simply its power 
to rationalise experience, and that any question of its 
relation to an objective reality is meaningless. The 
position I am at present describing is that a doctrine 
rationalises experience because it has, certainly in a 
limited and relative way, that relation to an objective 
reality which we call truth. 

This, we may notice, is the criterion used to test the 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 279 

truth of a scientific theory. The atomic theory of Dalton 
was originated because it gave a coherent and intelli¬ 
gible account of a certain number of physical facts of 
which the hypothesis of an infinitely divisible matter 
gave no explanation or with which it could only be 
reconciled by a large number of arbitrary and compli¬ 
cated assumptions. Such facts were the following: the 
law of combination in definite proportions, the law of 
multiple proportions, and the law of combination in 
simple proportions by volume. This theory has also 
shown its power to rationalise other facts not known to 
its discoverer. Such are: the rates of diffusion of gases, 
the connection between the abnormal molecular weights 
of electrolytes in solution and the electrical conductivity 
of these solutions, and the success of Van der Waal’s 
correction of Boyle’s Law. Both its power of rationalis¬ 
ing the facts known to its originator, and still more its 
power of rationalising later discoveries, give us reason 
for supposing that it possesses a real, though perhaps 
partial, insight into truth. We feel confident that, what¬ 
ever new discoveries about the constitution of matter 
may be made (such as those embodied in the electronic 
theory), the conception of discrete (though not neces¬ 
sarily indivisible) particles is nearer the truth about the 
real nature of matter than would be the alternative 
theory. 

It is necessary, however, to face fairly the weaknesses 
and defects of this criterion, which are the weaknesses 
and defects of the empirical method itself. Particular 
experiences may be illusory, i.e. the simple and intelli¬ 
gible explanation to which they appear to point may 
not be the true one. Thus, the simple rationalisation of 
monitory voices is that the person hearing them is in 
communication with a spirit, but a more careful psycho- 


280 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 

logical investigation may lead us to conclude that they 
are really received from unconscious levels of his own 
mind. The appearance of purpose in the construction of 
organisms is rationalised in a simple and satisfactory 
way by the assumption of an intelligent creator, but it 
may be argued that this appearance can be the effect of 
mechanical causes acting under particular conditions. 
It is not, therefore, sufficient to accept the most satis¬ 
factory rationalisation of any particular experience. It 
is also necessary to ask what is the probability that it is 
really due to some other cause, that its apparent in¬ 
dication of the simple rationalisation is an illusion. 
Neglect to do this is characteristic of infantile and 
primitive modes of thinking. When, however, different 
experiences covering a wide range point to rationalisa¬ 
tions, which are all essentially the same, the probability 
of error becomes less. The probability of error is, in 
fact, equal to the product of the probabilities of illusion 
in each particular case. But however small we may con¬ 
sider this probability to be, it cannot be zero. We can 
have a high degree of probability that the concordant 
indications of a wide range of experience are not entirely 
illusory, but we cannot have metaphysical certainty. At 
the same time, we have no reason for*supposing that the 
truths we have reached are absolute, any more than we 
have in the case of the atomic theory. A wider experi¬ 
ence has shown that it is necessary to modify that 
theory and to regard the atom, not as an indivisible 
unit, but as a system of negatively charged particles 
rapidly moving in orbits around a positive nucleus. But 
this in no way alters the fact that the atomic theory con¬ 
tained a real advance in truth from earlier theories. But 
the truth arrived at was not absolute and final. This 
fact might equally well have been illustrated by the 
Newtonian physics and the theory of relativity. In 


GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS 281 

the same way, there is no reason for claiming finality in 
religious doctrines; but so far as they are legitimate 
rationalisations from experience, later experience may 
be expected to modify, but not overthrow, these earlier 
rationalisations. 

If this method be accepted as a valid one, it will mean 
that where in earlier chapters the methods by which I 
suppose the mind to have reached religious belief by a 
process of explaining experience, were outlined and 
were noted as facts of merely psychological interest, we 
shall now regard them as of importance in helping to 
establish the truth of those beliefs. The fact that the 
belief in God rationalises, let us say, our experience of 
the moral conflict, will be one piece of evidence in 
favour of the view that the belief in God is a true 
one. If we find that this same belief also rationalises 
the facts of religious experience the evidence is pro¬ 
portionately strengthened, and so on for all the ex¬ 
perience we can investigate which is relevant to the 
belief in question. 

To sum up, we may regard its power to rationalise 
experience (which will include subjective experience) 
as a criterion of the truth of a religious hypothesis, as it 
is of a scientific hypothesis. Since we can never be sure 
that particular experiences are not illusory, we can 
never say more than that the success of a religious doc¬ 
trine in rationalising experience creates a strong pre¬ 
sumption in favour of its truth. A further presumption 
is created by its power to rationalise different and 
independent kinds of experience. 

In practice we find ourselves perpetually adopting 
this test of its ability to rationalise independent kinds 
of experience as a criterion of religious truth. The 
critically reflective mystic believes in his experiences 
only when they have as their result the progress of the 


282 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


soul in virtue. If he be a Catholic, he adds that they 
must be in conformity with the teachings of the Church; 
if a Protestant, with the teachings of the Bible. We may 
state his position in other words by saying that the 
justification of religious experience must be by its con¬ 
formity with the demands of the moral consciousness 
and with authority in religion as attested in other ways. 

If we find that by following the dictates of religious 
experience, we build up a system which, on the whole, 
corresponds with the religious system built up from con¬ 
sideration of the other types of relevant experience— 
i.e. the facts of the natural world, the historical facts 
of religions and the facts of the moral consciousness; 
then we have a very impressive argument for the gen¬ 
eral validity of religious experience. It is not necessary 
for the purpose of this argument to show that one of 
these four ways of approaching the truths of religion is 
certainly valid in itself and that the others may be 
justified because they are seen to point in the same 
direction. Undoubtedly an argument in this form 
would be simpler and more direct. It is enough to show 
that all four of these independent ways of approach 
point to a solution of the problems of religion which is 
substantially identical to provide a strong presumption 
that they are all based on a real insight into truth. If 
the God revealed by religious experience is found to be, 
in fact, the God required by the moral consciousness, 
and to be the God required to explain the world as we 
find it, and to be the God revealed in historical Chris¬ 
tianity, then the probability that each of these largely 
independent lines of approach to God is based on error 
becomes small. The probability that the concordant 
result of all four expresses some real insight into ob¬ 
jective reality becomes proportionately great. 


INDEX 


Acts, 69, 173 
Adler, 258 

Aesthetic argument, 40, 80 
Affect, 94 

Affective element in religion, 13, 
17, 58 ff. 

— prayer, 181 

— type of religion, 69 ff. 

Al Ghazzali, 90, 206 
Anaesthetic revelation, 62 
Anger, 95 

I’Annee Sociologique, 143 ff. 
Anselm, 12 
Aquinas, 50 

Arguments for the existence oi 
God, 79, 89, 273 
Arya Samaj, 160 
Asana positions, 168 
Asceticism, 35, 212, 257 
Atomic theory, 278 
Augustine, 36, 187, 196 ff. 
Automatism, 234, 245 
Autosuggestion, 24, 51, 162 ff., 
265 

Baudouin, 162, 184 
Beauty, 39 
Behaviour, 5 

Beneficence, experience of, 36 
Bergson, 89, 212 n. 

Billy Sunday, 152 
Binet, 106 
Blood, 61 
Booth, 216 ff. 

Brown low North, 28, 193 ff. 
Buddhism, 160 
Bunyan, 53 ff. 

Caldecott, 44 

Catherine of Genoa, 36, 213, 
238 




Cellini, 2, 55 
Ceremonial, 69 
Certainty, 66, 273 
Censorship, endopsychic, 112 
Character, 100, 117 
Chastity, 133 
Child, religion of, 17, 132 
Coe, 15, 49 
Cognition, 93 
Cohen, 129, 134 « ' v 
Collective ideas, 146 
Colloquy, 176 
Confession, 56, 179 
Conflict, mental, 188, 206 
Consciousness, 102 
Consecration, 178 
Contemplation, 68, 226 ff. 

— Ignatian, 178 
Contention, 166, 168 
Contrasuggestion, 23, 152 
Conversion, 83, 187 ff., 244 

— adolescent, 16, 66, 131, 
215 ff. 


187, 


— adult, 187, 191 ff. 

— intellectual, 191, 196 ff. 

— moral, 191 ff. 

— mystical, 191, 205 ff., 226 

— social, 191, 201 ff. 

-~Coue, 162 

Coventry Patmore, 135 

Dale, 40 
Dalton, 279 
Davenport, 154, 155, 156 
Delacroix, 225, 269 
Dementia praecox, 238 
Descartes, 79, 90 
Devil, the, 35, 75, 270 
Dictionary oj Psychological Medi¬ 
cine, 57 



283 


284 


INDEX 


Dissociation of personality, 240, 
245, 248 

Dostoieffsky, 63 
Dreams, 53, 111, 112, 114, 204, 
253, 268 

Dualism, 37, 42, 48 
\ vDurkheim, 144 

Ecstasy, 230 ff., 249 ff., 270 
Elliot Smith, 125 
Emotion, 94 ff. 

Empirical method, 9, 272 
Epilepsy, 63 

Evan Roberts, 68, 152, 157, 206 
Evelyn Underhill, 207 n. 

Evil, 35, 41 

Experiential element in religion, 
13 

Extroversion, 238 ff., 254 


Hatred, 97 
Head, 76 
Hegel, 2 
Hell, 153, 192 

Herd (or gregarious) instinct, 
122, 125, 140 ff., 159, 212 

— suggestion. 23 , 149 _ 

Hoffding, 4 
Hugel, von, 225, 238 ff. 

Hypnosis, 18, 20, 167, 246, 265 
Hysteria, 20, 155, 237, 245 




Faculty psychology, 93 
— transcendental, 7 
Faith, 274 
Fasting, 77, 134 
Faust, 33, 70 
Fear, 22 
Feeling, 93 
Feuerbach, 133, 264 
Flaubert, 70 
Flournoy, 242 ff. 
Francis, 43 
Frazer, 3 

Freud, 107 ff., 212 n . 


Ignatius Loyola, 175 
Immanence, 34 

Indescribability of mystical ex¬ 
perience, 251 

Infantile psyche, 114 to., 147, 185 
Instincts, 110, 117 ff. 
Intellectualisation, 31, 41 
Introspection, 11, 113 
Introversion, 236 ff., 254, 258 
Intuition, 73, 268 


James, 37, 48, 59, 87, 123, 203, 
274 

Jami, 135 
Janet, 56, 239 
Jansenism, 49, 208 
Jevon, 42 to. 

John of the Cross, 132, 236 
Jonathan Edwards, 153, 192 
Julian of Norwich, 137 
Jung, 136, 189, 212 to., 237, 277 , . 


GALTON, 122 

Gaps in knowledge, 261, 263 
Ghost dance, 157 
Givenness, 267 
Glossolalia, 156 
God, belief in, 12»ff. 

Goethe, 32 

Grace Abounding, 53 

Guyon, 213, 233 


Kentucky camp-meetings, 155 


\ 


Habit, 118 
Hall, 132, 187 
Hallucination, 18, 75> 

Hardy, 43 

Harmony, experience of, 38 
Hart, 81 
Hashish, 63 


Lawrence, Brother, 34 
Le Bon, 84, 143, 148 
Leuba, 2, 10, 73, 261, 268 n . 
Libido, 212, 236 ff., 277 
Ligature, 228 
Liguori, 57 
Lourdes, 182 

Love, 22, 99, 101, 129, 133, 209, 
212, 256, 278 


McDougall, 19, 66, 96, 97, 100, 
142 V 

»— B McTaggart, 3 
Mahomet, 65 
Mantra Yoga, 175 






INDEX 


285 


Martineau, 3 
Mass, 159 

Meditation, 69, 175 ff. 
Metaphysics, 271, 273 
Method of Psychology of Re¬ 
ligion, 5 ff. 

Moods, 97 

Moral argument, 46, 80 

— conflict, 45, 110 

Moral element in religion, 13, 
45 ff. 

— law, 45 

— principles, 22 

— type of religion, 49 
Myers, C. S., 96 

Myers, F. W. H., 2, 104, 113 
Mysticism, 58, 101, 132, 205, 
225 ff., 269 

Natural element in religion, 13, 
30 

— type of religion, 44 
Nature mysticism, 31 
Negative self-feelmg, 66 
Neurosis and religion, 277 
New Thought, 162, 183 
Night of the Soul, 227, 236 
Normality, 14 

Nouet, 181 

Objective validity of religious 
experience, 266 ff., 282 
Obsessions, 54 

Ontological argument, 79, 88 
Optimism, 42 
Overcompensation, 23 

Pachomius, 52 
Paley, 30, 38 
Pantheism, 32 
Parental complex, 136, 255 

— instinct, 121 
Pascal, 206, 207 ff. 

Paul, 187, 189 
Penances, 177, 235 
Perry, 125 
Pfister, 137 n. 

Philosophy of religion, 6, 260, 
271 

Poulain, 173, 182 n., 225, 228, 
269 


Pragmatism, 278 
Pranayama, 177 
Pratt, 55, 155, 159, 225, 262 ff. 
Prayer, 162, 171 ff. 

— by rhythmical beats, 177 

— of quiet, 228, 247 

— of simplicity, 166, 180, 226, 
228 

— of union, 229 

Prayer, mental, 21, 172, 175 ff. 

— vocal, 173, 174 
Preconscious, 108, 112 
Presence of God, feeling of, 59 

67 

Prestige, 22, 24, 151 
Prideaux, 23, 96 
Providence, 37, 126 
Pseudo-Dionysius, 237 
Psyche, 128 n. 

Psychoanalysis, 22, 111, 136 ff., 
246, 264 

Psychological laws, 261 
Puritanism, 49 

Questionnaire, 10 
Quietism, 167, 180, 186 

Rational elements in religion, 13, 
78 ff. 

— type of religion, 88 ff. 
Rationalisation, 81 ff., Ill 
Raymond, 56 

Reality of objects of religion, 6 
Regression, 22, 136 
Relativity, 280 
Religion, definition of, 4 
Religious consciousness, 4 

— experience, 5 
Repression, 109, 188, 205 
Research workers, scientific, 214 
Resistance, 111, 188, 196 
Revelation, 271, 273 
Reverence, 100 

Reverie, 165, 169 
Reversed effort, law of, 51, 163, 
172 

Revivals, 152 ff. 

Ribot, 78, 98 
Rivers, 21, 23, 113, 120 
Rosary, 175 
Royce, 4 




286 


INDEX 


Rulman Merswin, 207 
Ruskin, 44 

Sadhu Sundar Singh, 75 n., 77, 
115 to., 201, 227, 230 
Sainthood, 48 
Salvation Army, 9, 24 
ScARAMELLI, 228 
ScHROEDER, 127 ff. 

Scientific hypothesis, 279 ff. 
Self-consciousness, 60 
Self-preservation, instincts of, 
121 

Sentiment, 97 ff. 

— the religious, 100, 124, 179, 
213, 226 

Sentimentalism, 70 
Sex-instinct, 120, 124, 127 ff., 222, 
255 

Shaker religion, 157 
Shand, 96 ff. 

Silberer, 258 

Sin, concern for, 50, 66 

— meditation on, 176 

— the unpardonable, 55, 57 
Sorley, 266 

Spens, 276 

Spiritual Marriage, 232 ff., 238, 
254 

Spurgeon, 150, 157 
Starbuck, 10, 34, 65, 124, 131, 
187, 215, 219 ff. 

Stories of Grace, 27, 192 
Subconscious, 6, 103 
Sublimation, 110, 112, 124, 134, 
213, 223, 259 
Sufism, 90, 206 
Suggestibility, 20 ff., 149, 184 
Suggestion, 17 ff., 114, 221, 265 

— post-hypnotic, 103 
Suppression, 110, 133, 213 
Supraconscious, 7, 105 
Suso, 213 

Swearing Tom, 192, 196 


Swift, 99 
Swinburne, 33, 61 
Symbolism, 114, 147 
Symonds, 61 

Teaching, religious, 26 
Teresa, 68, 74, 76, 173, 228 ff., 
240, 270 

Thinking, 31, 114, 165 
Thomas a Kempis, 36, 142 
Thoreau, 31 
Torrey, 149 

Traditional element in religion, 
13, 16 ff., 146, 251 

— type of religion, 27 
Transference, 22, 27, 246 
Trials, 235 

Trotter, 23, 140 
Types, 14 

Unconscious, 102 ff., 268 

— incubation, 189, 203 

Van Teslaar, 128 n. 

Ve, Mlle, 242 ff. 

Virgin Mary, 138 
Visions and locutions, 73 ff., 205, 
207, 226, 268 
Visual imagery, 76, 175 

Ward, 96 

Way, the threefold, 228 
Webb, 148 n. 

Wesley, 157 

Will, 94, 185, 186, 211, 253 
Will to Believe, 274 
Wish-fulfilment, 47, 265 
Wordsworth, 33 
Worship, 159 ff. 

Yoga, 165 ff., 231 
Younghusband, 43 

Zoroastrianism, 42 


6 86 


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